Moooving

Life is a-changing in such huge ways. Just the sheer conceptual overwhelmingness of recent months has made me gun shy when it comes to this blog.

Here. I'll bullet it.
-We're moving to the Great State of Massachusetts, that fresh-faced home to gay marriage, the Red Sox, Sam Adams and my extended family.
-Lion and I are gettin' Hitched. To which I say, Hoorah! This is old news, but due to scheduling and geographic constraints the actually doing of the deed is just shy of one year off.
-We're headed to Guatemala for a month.
-Two days after we return from Guatemala, I'm starting Medical School.
-I'm starting Medical School, let's just repeat.
-Lion is starting grad school. We only have one desk. But plenty of bookshelves.
-We're leaving the place we've been for the last five years.

The Hudson Valley. Sigh. This is the first place I have made my home as an adult. It's the first place that was unconnected to my family that I really have called home and felt was home. The fact that we're leaving it has left me feeling this really profound kind of sad that is a totally new feeling for me. I've gone away from places before, several times, and it has just never felt like this. Even with all we have to look forward to, I'm struggling to get excited about our next steps. Our lives in Poughkeepsie and friends scattered up the Valley have been so many kinds of wonderful. I think part of my difficulty is that it isn't just the people I'm sad to leave. We have the best kinds of friends here and I am confident we'll keep in touch and visit back and forth. I know from my past that it is plenty possible to stay close with those who leave your day-to-day or week-to-week. As sad as it will be to leave the likes of UP and DHM, Turtle and the crew on the other side of the river, our Roller Derby teammates (ok, that's a whole other post), and Pok neighbors, it is the leaving of this place that really gets to me. How do you stay close to a place when you are not there? How do you keep it as a part of you. Our sometimes housemate, the prodigal Farmboy/Devout environmentalist of our lives, gifted us a set of white oval bumperstickers with the initials "PKNY" to commemorate our love of this funny town forever on our cars. I feel like part of some club available only to a select few. The people I know I will not lose. And the ways in which I depend on them in the here-and-now will be filled by the old friends we'll be closer to and new friends we'll be making. But the Hudson River cannot come with us, nor can Waryas Park, Main Street Poughkeepsie, the crazy lady at the top of our hill, favorite little restaurants and bakeries, chance encounters with Pete Seeger, or the shared experience of this place. The Hudson ties people together geographically, across town boundaries. It defines this region apart from others and gave birth a grand history of art, folk music and environmentalism.

Part of what's hard for me personally is that we're moving to a place that many people find easy to love. Lord knows there's nothing unique about going to school in Boston. It seems to be in many ways the country's biggest college town. And while I'm grateful to be going to a great school and to be closer to family and old friends, Boston is not much of a challenge. Poughkeepsie has laughed, "you just go on and try to like me if you can" to me since I wandered here as a college freshcat and got hopelessly lost downtown in search of the Unitarian Church. It's a place much easier to write off than Boston or Providence and the growing ranks of those of us who have grown to love it share some pride in our different ways of seeing it.

I'm Baaaaack

No, no, not in creepy horror movie way.

Seriously. GW is having some growing pains as a blog. Clearly we over extended ourselves with the "I'm going to post every day" thing. Now we can't even decide if I'm "I" or "we." See how things are?

I have recovered from the trying to post all the time and failing induced whiplash and guilt and have decided once again to make something of this her blog. I've also gotten my own blog reading a bit more under control. No gone are the days of hours-long archive binges! Gone are the days of trying to read everything on half a dozen political blogs.

Substantive post coming soon, stay tuned.

One Thing at a Time

I multi-task. I multi-task, A LOT. I'm a multi-tasker. I used to think, "Hey, I'm such a good multi-tasker!" But recently I've realized that I actually must multi-task. I'm now a multi-taking addict.

Exhibit A: The browser tab. I never ever ever have only one browser tab open. Minimum is probably four. One for email, one for pandora, one for calendar, one for blackboard, one for Google reader, one for the local paper or the NY Times or a google search for "public sewer department, NY," one for the episode of House that I'm listening to illicitly in the background while I work. You get the idea.

Exhibit B: The Lab. I used to think I was extremely efficient in lab work. Back in college I was almost always one of the first people done precisely because I multi-tasked. I seem to have taken this too far. Sometimes I am: doing a titration with one hand and eyeball, reading feministing.com with the other eyeball, making calibration solutions in between and also listing to streamed mpr.org I think my lab technique is suffering.

Exhibit C: The home. Laptop on lap, seven browser tabs open. Excel spreadsheet behind. Father on Phone. Attempting to communicate with Lion via facial expression. The latter usually backfires resulting in me getting in trouble for not paying attention to her. She is always right about this.

When I wait for a website to load, I get jittery. I think it feels like what it used to feel like to drink too much coffee, back when drinking too much coffee felt like anything. I can't seem to focus on just one thing. I suspect this might cause me trouble in med school. So, starting now, I'm instituting a one-thing-at-a-time policy. At least for a few weeks until I get a knack for it and can trust myself to find a better balance. Maybe this means that sometimes that one thing will be this blog. It's much easier to focus on when it's the only thing open in my web browser.

It's Fixin Time

So, three days in DC at the NCSE did not leave me feeling all doom and gloom. I mean, it goes to reason that days and days of "hockey stick" graphs would leave you in a serious funk. A hockey stick graph is, if you haven't heard this clever lingo, is like the one below that shows global temperature cruising along steadily for hundreds or even thousands of years and then BANG shooting up over the last 200 or so. (The particular one I've shown via a paper by Micheal Mann, et al).

But I didn't leave feeling horrifically depressed.

And, yeah, I saw a hell of a lot of "yikes" figures. Like pictures of the appalling record arctic ice melt. Or stats like unchecked we could see 50% of the species on this planet become extinct. But as much as my feeling on climate change is now even more that we are at an incredibly crucial tipping point, I'm also full of hope. Because public opinion is changing incredibly rapidly on this issue. Because even though it will be incredibly hard work, we can have the strength. Because so many climate change solutions are win-win for our country and our economy.

I'd like everyone to gear up with me for Focus the Nation. Make a plan for 8PM on Jan 30 to watch the 2% solution. I'll add more on this later, but first I do want to say that it gives me hope that it's my generation who is tasked with this effort. I know that we are oft-maligned as the "me generation" or whathave you, but this is the generation that I know. And I trust my fellows to be the ones to rewire this nation and every city on the planet. Because I know us better than I could know any other generation, I do believe that we will fight free of the fossil fuel economy and work out a new food system.

Martin Luther King Day, for which I'm sad to say the SLAC did not release me from its clutches, is a day for hoping high and believing the the world we ought to have. It is a day for acknowledging the immense complexity of that which blights the ways we treat one another and because it is often so similar, the way we treat or environments.

The Schmooze

So, it turns out that meetings of this variety have substantial schmooze component!

Ok, I knew that, but somehow I imagine climate scientists and policy folks as largely unable to schmooze in the tradition of the socially capable non-nerds. Anyway, not only do these people schmooze, but they schmooze with delish wine, organic beer, organic vegetarian pizza, pumpkin ravioli etc, etc, etc! They do it while balancing these things in their hands and managing to shake each others. It's highly impressive. I suppose in an effort to initiate the young'ns, they organized a "social outing" for students and young professionals last night. It was, uh, dear. Some person from the NCSE escorted us to a pub and there we ate and mingled. It sort of smacked of a "children's" program, but I guess was nice.

Anyway, my lovely compatriots are more hardcore schmoozers than I expected. By which I mean to say that I'm exhausted. A true recap, I promise, for tomorrow.

Singing to the Scientists

Today was a whirlwind of climate scientist, policy geniuses and generally just loads of people who are out of my league.

But I just first want to tell you about one person. Right in the middle of a bunch of gray-haired white dudes giving wild climate change lectures, they had one presentation from a Caribou woman.

She talked about the history of her people and their beliefs. Their conviction that the creator gave them their little piece of Alaskan arctic to protect. She talked about sliding down snowy hills in a caribou skin snowsuit. And then she sang.

For about three seconds I watched the too-serious about some kinds of things audience not take her seriously. There were half smiles and averted eyes all over the place. But when she finished her prayer song for us the applause was more enthusiastic than for any lecture. Then she told us about the here and now first hand effects of climate change that her people are already feeling in incredibly tangible and painful ways.

My colleague, a librarian, turned to me afterwards and said, "you know, in five years, she's the one that I'll remember."

Going All Over the Country To Fight Global Warming

I'm fighting global warming again! Sort of. Actually, I'm at the annual conference of the National Committee on Science and the Environment (which could use a better website). In Washington DC. Me and a couple of gray-haired rockin women are representing the SLAC.

Since it's DC, the pub we had dinner in was blasting the Democratic debate in Nevada tonight. The candidates looked... tired. Really just that more than anything else. They just stumbled a lot more than I'm used to. Especially Obama. I think I've come to expect him to be calm and articulate all of the time. And man, Clinton needs a nap. And Edwards just looks bummed that he already lost this one. Again.

Also, I'm extremely jealous of Alison who is at Macworld. I want I want! Oops, I mean consumerism is BAD.