"What do you do?"

It's a mundane question that I've never been happy with. It elevates, or it assumes such an elevation, occupation to ontology. That is to say: You are your job. It reduces leisure time activities to a sideline, when it seems that, for most of us, the roles should be reversed. I imagine that I am not unusual (especially for those with a college education) in that my career path has been more determined by happenstance and whimsy than any sort of planning. On the other hand, the development of how I spend my time outside of work seems comparably sane, and more "me," in the way I've had control over it.

As I see it, "gain" touches on what I do. It includes work (and I've been fortunate, in the degree to which I've been able to take the vortex of employment available under late 20th centure flexibly accumulating capitalism and twist it to something I can be passionate about), and work-related matters, as well as education. I'll probably also make it more generic, and look at economic and fiscal matters (the distinction, in my mind, is that economics is the theory, and usually a matter of scale or abstraction, whereas fiscal is the actual wayward running of dollars through my own purse), as well as give it a final twist, and include matters of spiritual or existential improvementBeing non-religious, I have this hazy conception of ought which totters unsteadily between morality and "the good life," and includes notions of healthiness, conduct and what you owe yourself. I think that if you're a religious person, this can be understood in spiritual terms; if you're not, it's probably more of an Wilsonian-style existential claim. (for this, we'll have to see where whimsy leads).

But! The mundane first: I do survey research and program evaluation. For the former, I've worked for university-based centers that contract for outside clients for data collection. Usually we work with clients to refine what they want to find out into something that is methodologically decent, and then implement it, clean up the data, and pass it on to the data. In the past year, this has included some very basic report writing. Most of these projects have been telephone surveys, though there have been a handful of mail and internet surveys. (Examples of surveys I've worked on: 1 and 2.) For th latter (program evaluation), I've worked with organizations that provide some service (such as, and when I say "such as" I mean "to date," low-income energy assistance, social services for maintaining families, and Nevada's statewide merit-based scholarship) to determine how well they're doing what they agreed to do. As I said before, I'm lucky in that, even though this is simply what's been handed to me, I do find it fascinating. (Well, until the fourth week of the report; I start to get a little resentful at that stage.) What's been extremely fortunate for me, though, was that one of these programs crystallized for me what I'd like to do for good.

In August, I move to Michigan to begin working on my Masters of Urban Planning. My goal is to twist Michigan's UP concentration in environmental planning to look at energy policy and planning, with a focus on promoting renewable energy sources. Of course, even as I gear up for this, and start to read stuff outside of this focus (like The Death and Life of Great American Cities or A New Theory of Urban Planning), I get a touch of wanderlust. So we'll see how this goes.

Culinary and the social

A special case of Utility & Craft. I like food, on a personal level, both the making and the consuming, though I'm not very good at either (although I'm better when the two go together). I'm also interested in knowing about the food, both nutrionally (okay, not so much this, but I do try to pay attention) and socially.

"Socially" probably gets a raised eyebrow. I'm interested in where my food comes from, and what happens to it along the way. This is for both frankly political reasons (below) and because ... I don't know. I'm just interested in knowing how stuff comes to me.

Okay, so the confession: I'm vegetarian, but I'm a really bad vegetarian. (Someone I met once described it, for herself, as being a low-impact carnivore.) I started about a year ago (1 June 2002), and since then have had meat about once a month. (Like an idiot, I think it's interesting that I can enumerate these "lapses.") Some of these were not really my fault (for example, getting sausage gravy that I didn't order on hash browns at Dennys; it seemed stupider to send it back than to eat it), but most of them were: fish for dinner in San Francisco for my birthday, a barbecue fest in neighboring Sparks, Thanksgiving turkey. I don't feel particularly badly about this (hence the scare-quotes around "lapses," above), both because I think it keeps me honest and humble about it and (more substantially) because my reasons for being vegetarian are essentially tentative.

Probably the prime reason is that I feel the "meat industry" is horrific, to people, animals and land. This is pretty much rote Fast Food Nation stuff, but it's the kind of thing in which I don't like to be implicated. I think, even aside from whether it's immoral to kill and eat animals, that the treatment they get in most farms and slaughterhouses is gut-wrenching; I think that the human toll of slaughterhouses is despicable; and I think that the environmental impact of large-scale farming ain't so great either.

Past that, I'm ambivalent about the ethics and morality of meat-eating in and of itself. I'm also uncomfortable with the presumption our culture takes with animals. For example, I could not slaughter a pig myself. I might be able to kill a chicken, but I doubt it. If I'm unwilling to kill it myself, why does the fact that I only get it at the last step suddenly make it okay? Further, take the long view: Right now I'm ambivalent about animal rights, but what about ten years from now? Whichever way I decide, where am I if it conflicts with my decision now? That is, if I decide ten years from now that eating animals is wrong (and I confess, it's an argument I'm susceptible to), but I've been eating them everyday for the past ten years, well, that'll suck. But if I decide that, actually, it's okay, I am at peace with it, but I've been vegetarian for ten years ... what have I lost?

I don't think I will have lost anything, even given my lapses. I think that overall, I've expanded my cooking chops and knowledge, and massively expanded what vegetables I'll eat (I was kind of a picky eater, growing up; I'm still that way, really). I consider the past year to have been an enjoyable exploration.

But anyway, that's just sort of setting the context. It's not something I really plan to dwell on from here on out. (I do welcome respectful probings at my reasoning though; I never hesitated to ask vegetarians and vegans for their reasons.)

Currently, my two "staple" cookbooks are Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, which I think is invaluable not so much because the recipes are extraordinary, but because it provides a useful re-orientation for cooking, as well as providing a number of recipes with multiple modifications; the other staple is Marvin Woods' The New Low-Country Cookbook, which is Southern cooking, slightly revamped (and less reliant on bacon). It's not a vegetarian cookbook, but I think a lot of the recipes fit well with a vegetarian diet. Though I'm in no way tied to it, and don't really pursue it very actively, I'm actually very interested in developing, or even finding, a vegetarian take on southern cooking. (You'll soon find that I have a weird relationship with being a Southerner, and it's largely rooted in developing some sort of authentic, and slightly quirky, identity for myself. I'm also a late-blooming NASCAR fan.) A lot of what I default to now for meals is greens and sweet potatoes (though I got hooked on the combo from a non-Southern source) and corn (especially creamed). There's still a large divide between what I eat and what's traditional (even aside from the meat), and a lot of it is due to my preference for under-, rather than over-, cooked vegetables.

Anyhow, this category will probably, contra my lofty goals, mostly get used as dinner reports. So let me inaugarate:

Tonight, I'm having fiesta zuchinni (courtesy a five-year old Bon Appetit T bought at a thrift store for ten cents), mashed potatoes, asparagus, and spinach and avocado salad.

Freedom and community

Mere hours after completing the previous entry, my introduction to utility & craft, I read Richard Posner's article from last week's New Republic, attacking the idea of mandatory service (largely defined in his piece as mandatory military service, or the draft, but he hints at mandatory non-military work as well). (As an aside, I'm not sure that there's a big movement to re-instate the military draft, but that's not really pertinent here.) Posner's argument, and I'm reversing the order in this rendition, is that the push for mandatory service comes from communitarians, who are the currently (and generally, not just with respect to the draft) the biggest threat to the Millsian, centrist concept of maximum economic and personal liberty.

In Posner's telling, the nearly maximized freedom we currently enjoy is a result of the left's protection of personal liberties and the right's protection of economic liberties. What we are left with is a situation where either side is unable to make substantive in-roads in curtailing either sort of liberty, because both sides' first task is to protect what they have. The two are able to hold each other at bay, and we in the big middle are the better for it.

However, he warns that this balance is under attack from an idealistic, but wrong-headed, group of communitarians:

These political theorists think that liberalism as practiced in the United States today is causing people to lose all sense of communal responsibility. They argue that people are becoming self-preoccupied and thus indifferent to the claims of the community. As evidence they point to our high rates of crime and divorce and out-of-wedlock births; and to our declining rates of participation in communal activities such as voting; and even to the prevalence of commuting and the popularity of television-watching because these (the first especially) tend to be solitary activities.

He continues outlining the major target of communitarian complaint: the ever-encroaching reach of commodification. It's at this point that, if you read the previous post, you should start seeing where my angle is.

Posner moves quickly on to the question of mandatory service, which I'm less interested in right now, and only briefly tosses off a general critique of communitarianism, essentially saying that once communitarians have had their say about the evils of commodification (or its symptoms), they don't have a lot to contribute in the way of useful goals or tools to achieve them. Part of this critique, and I'm mostly surmising, given his introduction, is that communitarians want to legislate their point of view. I don't think that this is necessarily untrue generally. For myself, though, I want to clarify my own stance on this.

First, most of what I'll be looking at on this site, in terms of prescriptions, are for my self, and anyone who finds his or her interest coinciding. However, that's a little disingenious (and not just because I have no doubt I'll start talking politics soon): this coming fall, I'll be starting school, studying urban planning, which (assuming I graduate) will put me very close to where legislation happens. So, my other clarification, more useful generally, is that I think that there is much that various levels of government do that impacts the symptoms of commodification, as Posner describes it. We are here already, and my interest is in shifting, subtly as well as in large ways, the way we spend money, so that instead of discouraging communities, they are encouraged. I do think that this can be done with little further curtailing of liberty, and with the very real goal of encouraging freedom alongside community.

Attempts to master my own life

I've never really been a hands-on sort of person. Growing up, I wanted more than anything to work for NASA, and when I went to college, I majored in aerospace engineering. That lasted about two years. Partly it suffered from a freshman's lack of enthusiasm for school work; partly it suffered from the hazing given to new students by senior aero-e majors: "There are no jobs, get out now, you'll never find work, certainly not in space, there are no jobs there no are jobs there are no jobs."

The big thing, though, or at least what I tell myself the big thing was, was that I tried to envision two futures for myself, an engineering future and another, rather more vague future, somehow jointly defined by sociology and writing. (This casting alternate futures side by side is something I find myself doing a lot.) The engineering future's biggest problem was that I couldn't imagine myself being a real engineer, which to my mind is someone who goes beyond the paper and can tinker with things. I've never had this ability. I couldn't imagine respecting myself if I became a glorified draftsman, working under fluorescent lights in dust-free environment. Not that that isn't a valuable job, it's just not what I see as the right way.

So I bailed. My educational history isn't the point, though. The point is that I have this inevitably neurotic fixation on manually working with and understanding things. This is where utility and craft comes in. As I said in the introduction to the webmastery category, I'm constantly defeated by everything around me. To take an acute example: during the trailing days of winter (which in Reno, encroaches fairly far into spring), our furnace failed, and was fixed, and failed, and was fixed, and so on. All throughout, I was quite unable to discern what was going on with it, and couldn't even really begin to do something as rudimentary as restart the pilot light.

I don't like this feeling, of being held captive to specialists. Further, I think this easily becomes one of C. Wright Mills' private troubles and public issues, where the individual experience cannot usefully be solved without recourse to the larger social circumstances. (It's likely I'm being a bit tendentious here, but I think the relationship is the same, even if we're not quite to the level of troubles and issues.) In this case, I think that the forever parsing of personal responsibility into profit-areas is the public and social dynamic undergirding much of what I'm experiencing.

By saying this, I don't mean to suggest that, for instance, there should be some political solution to my inability to restart a pilot light. I only wish, at the outset, to place my own personal attempts to overcome my mechanical limitations within what I see as the most relevant context.

So. All of that said, what exactly goes here? All of my attempts to master my daily life, as well as attempts to begin producing for myself. (An important exception to this is food, which gets its own category.) The primary "producing for myself" activity at the moment is woodwork, which I enjoyed as a kid, and am trying to relearn now. I don't think that it's useful to pretend that I'll even produce everything I need by hand, but I do think that there's a wide array of things that can usefully by done by myself (bookshelves, additions to desks and so on). At this point, my woodworking can best be described as a hilarious misadventure, so I have quite a ways to go.

Site design and plans

My plan for beginning this thing, which I will derisively refer to as a glob, is to introduce each category and situate myself within each. This category, then, is Webmastery, and will deal with site design issues, maintenance and announcements. It will also bleed over into the little bit of web-tech that I can geek about. This announcement will also serve to outline what this glob is about.

First, though, the tech stuff, from the ground up. This site, theotherleading.com, is hosted by Connecticut Web, a (frankly) dirt-cheap provider. Given how little I pay them, CT-Web does surprisingly well. There are odd limits to what I can do, and there are too-frequent outages, but overall I can't say I'm too displeased. Of course, I don't run a particularly intense web operation.

tol.com, as I refer to it (and don't go to the actual tol.com; it's of no relation), originally housed The Toucan, a print zine I used to help put out; it still does, but I'm looking to branch out a little.

The glob, which is the current project and which I refer to variously as "800 by whatever" and "the new rose template", is powered by Moveable Type, for no other reason than that a bunch of friends talk about it a lot, so of course I had to dive in, too. It's a bare bones operation right now, and I'd like to keep it that way. The major addition I want to add is to create and link to wiki entries for each post, to use in lieu of comments, which I find to be ... a little tough to follow usefully, and meandering to boot. That's a ways off from being within my grasp, but feel free to manually create pages should the urge strike you.

This extraordinarily inventive template design is of my own creation coding, with substantial improvement by my friend null. It is all CSS, with a javascript switcher (also courtesy null) that allows the sidebar to be fixed (that is, non-scrolling) in Mozilla, but not in Internet Explorer (which does not support fixed positioning). I haven't yet checked the design in other browsers, particularly with respect to the fixed column.

Eventually, I hope that it validates for both CSS and HTML, but haven't really bothered to check yet.

The new rose, in the upper left, is based on the Macintosh Rose, a staple of Arts and Crafts design (see below). The rose column on the right is from squidfinger's excellent catalog of patterns, with some coloring adjustments.

Inevitably, I've arrived at the question of what this is all about. Again, from the ground up:

I've taken an interest lately in the turn-of-the-century-ish Arts & Crafts movement, which aimed, in a delightfully bourgeois way, to connect a workingman's paradise with an appreciation of fine craft. I look at craft in a broader sense than I believe the original members of Arts & Crafts circles did, extending the appreciation to something more like techne. This swirling combination of dare-I-say-it utopianism, appreciation, craftsmanship, and knowledge is what I'm trying to structure my life around right now.

The knowledge, though, is tricky. If the Arts & Crafts movements provides something of a structure to how I see the world, then that structure is given urgency by my other primary organizing idea: Georg Simmel's concept of the tragedy of culture. (Bear with me -- at this point, I'm working from a brief encounter with Simmel from seven years ago; I'll revisit this soon.) Simmel's concept of culture was split between objective and subjective culture. Objective culture was stuff out there--things and knowledge. Subjective culture was what each person carried around within them. The tragedy of culture was that objective culture grows exponentially over time, and knows no bounds, while people's capacity for subjective culture grows barely at all. That is, any one person's capacity to know about his or her world is constantly shrinking in relation to what there is to know.

Sitting at my desk, I cannot place my eyes on a single thing within the room whose production, to name but one aspect of any thing, does not escape me. Move away from simple knowledge, and consider things that I use, or tasks that I must do. I fret over my inability know what's going on when I wash my clothes. What goes into the detergent? Where does it go when it drains out with the rinse water afterwards? Does it harm something along the way, or when it disperses into ... the river? the valley? And the fragrance that the dye graces my clothes with--does it aggravate my girlfriend's asthma? Does it irritate my skin? Might it do so for a notional child, years down the road?

Someone knows this. Someone has studied and concocted and tested and poked and prodded. Someone has done it for everything in your life. The amount of effort that goes into the tinest things that we take for granted is astounding. And so part of the goal of the new rose template is to give me space to explore and make notes. Some of this will be research, some of it will be reporting on my own activities, some of it will just be mental wandering. But I hope that all of it will result in a slight mastery over those parts of objective culture around me that want to flit away.