The New Days Feel Old

Woke up early this morning. There are so many roosters in the neighborhood that the cacophony of crowing is hard to ignore. I would have liked more sleep but, hey, there's a lot to do.

I went across the yard to Aoife's house to use her terminal. Kim has been doing some techno-wizardry to our individual computers to provide another layer of security, but mine didn't like it and she needs to straighten it out. Turns out there's a line at Aoife's; Costa's ancient motherboard crapped out again and Bae's house no longer has power. Someone got into NYSEG's database last week and cut the power to all refugees in town. Whatever they did, NYSEG is having trouble undoing, and they may have to revert to removing the wireless gauges from each house in order to get power going again (and actually track the power to make the customer pay for it). And Bae refuses to join the power collective; he wants power all the time, as much as possible.

I think that's pretty boneheaded, all things considered, but some folks just don't look at what's going on around them. He and his family made it out of a bad situation, spent most of their money getting here and getting set up, and now, well, they want to live the American Dream.

Too bad that Dream no longer exists, if it every really did.

He went from a relatively comfortable life as a commodities trader in Singapore (as weather and health and energy all melted away there) to being a funds shuffler for the county. He's the guy who tracks transactions and tallies everyone's resources and watches out for ID theft, moneyghosting, phishing, and echo transfers. It is a complicated job, and there's no way one person can do it, but he says that as long as he catches most of it, he's doing his job. He hates it, and he's already had to deflect several bribery offers, one attempt at blackmail, and a pile of hacks on his home system (which he also keeps separate from our local net, which makes folks suspicious), but it's a job, at least. I envy him that.

But that's not the reason I'm writing this. I can talk about the neighbors later.

So, after about 40 minutes, I get to use the computer. Aoife kindly makes tea for us all while we wait, and I am on my third cup by the time I get to the terminal. I check email, twists, a few blogs, see that LJ has been taken down again and just give up there and delete my account, and struggle to reach each site through the massive layers of filters and popups. Kim is our full-time tech person, and she even gets primo swaps to work overtime, but again, one person just can't do it. She can't run, maintain, and protect 11 computers running on a custom-designed server that probably has more protection than one of those legendary machines in the basement at Fort Meade. She gets by with installing all kinds of baroque layers of protection that make navigation a headache. "Surfing the web" just does not happen anymore. Most sites require sign-up, constant password checks, security scans of your address, and sometimes even human contact. Checking two email accounts, twists, three blogs, and a service site for a project I am writing a grant for takes nearly 40 minutes, and I spend less than two minutes at each site.

I have a headache when I get up from the terminal. Izzy shoots by me and virtually lashes herself to the chair to beat Rudy to it. I can hear their mother Cathleen yellling at them as I leave Aoife's house, a final cup of herbal tea designed especially to deal with post-net headaches in my mug.

I get dizzy as I pass through one of the gardens, and then I realize I did not get to check the news. I swear under my breath and keep walking. Seven of our computers are down, and Aoife's has the best security (a benefit of sleeping with the tech, surely!), so everyone is queued up at her little office now, and there's no way I'm going to get back on that machine before lunchtime.

Gods do I miss radio.

When I get back to the house I decide to do some work before I walk the dog. I have three grant proposals to finish and class prep for the week. I think of the quaint notion of a lazy Sunday and wish I could smile about it. But I heard from the department admin that her counterpart told her that over 900 proposals were solicited for each grant, and only two days after the announcement almost 40 were already in. It was possible that they had a submission cap in mind and that after they reached that number they would close submissions. So, they have to get done. We need supplies for the garden, books for the kids, and I need a job next spring. The Greater Tompkins Educational Consortium would provide all three (the first through its alliance with Cornell Cooperative Extension, the other two on its own). But everything is about grant proposals nowadays. I miss the days of job applications and co-op request forms. . . .

I have everything laid out on my desk. It's daunting; I had to do a lot of reading for the garden proposal because up until this year I did little more than weed, water, and vote for crops. But since Terry never came back from Bermuda (stupid ReDS), all grant-writing has fallen to me. And he was also the best gardener, and Jin hasn't the time to do much more than give me a list of what she needs for next year. But the grants guidelines are really tight; I could honestly lose the proposal by asking for one too many tools or a hundredweight too much of mulch, or something. And we depend too much on the gardens to not get what we need for them next year. I hear talk of local embargos, even higher fuel surcharges for food shipping, and of course the rumors of massive crops of tainted grains. We need to make as much of our own food as we can now.

And that is why I am now sitting here writing this (to be sent later from Aoife's terminal, of course) after just sitting for a half-hour trying to keep it together. It's all too much; everything seems to be happening all at once. I just sat and thought, over and over" "What can one person do?!?!?"

I don't have the answer. I felt a bit better after I realized that. I do not have the answer. No one person has the answer. And if the past several years have taught me something, it is that one person does not have the answer. I look out from my upstairs office over the gardens and solar-catchers of the neighborhood, at empty driveways and cracked roads, at goats grazing in the old playground, and I realize the enormity of the moment we're in, we as in humankind. A lot of mistakes, miscalculations, and deliberate actions have brought us to a critical point. I think that I, and those around me, have spent the last several years reacting, each doing what we can individually, coming together when needed, but not really. . . consolidating, I guess. I read the news as much as I can, read what others are seeing and doing, and I think it's time to take a step forward. It's time to get past the struggling and try to make something.

So, as a first step, I've created this blog, and I hope I can use it to both record what's happening and try to understand better what's going on, and how I and others have created what is happening and how we can shape a better outcome to this huge mess that seems to be drowning us. Yeah, blogging is kind of a silly first step, especially in this age of electronic unreliability, but maybe if we start to communicate with each other not to complain, but to rethink, perhaps we can make some kind of plan to progress, rather than just waste away in place.

Maybe we can take hope, hard-learned lessons, and the experience of this increasingly frightening moment in history, and shape a better tomorrow. Maybe. But until it becomes we and not just a bunch of Is, I am not sure if that can be done.