It’s voting day in the US.

My state is due to elect, in a landslide, a governor so personally and politically disgusting that I can’t imagine how even his own party likes him.

The country is expected to elect, in various landslides, many people who are somewhat similar.

The reason? People don’t think. Or, more precisely, people are made not to think by the various forces in their lives. Sloppy journalism. Sensationalist, inaccurate Facebook shares. The ill-formed opinions of others, spread like wildfire. Who can blame them, really? Thinking about big issues is hard, unsatisfying, unsettling work. Thinking is uncomfortable, and our educational system hardly prepares us to handle it.

More importantly, though, people are afraid. They are afraid that there isn’t enough to go around. Afraid that the world will fall apart, if we don’t hold it together with all our might. Afraid of “the enemy,” without realizing that the enemy is a straw man, not an enemy at all.

It’s easy to despair. Most of my friends will spend the next two weeks reading (and obsessively posting to Facebook) about all of the “horrible” candidates that have been elected to various positions. We will expend our energy wailing and gnashing our teeth, fighting ferociously with our own friends and family.

STOP.

Consider instead that the point is to better the world. Is delivering the perfect sarcastic rebuttal to Uncle Joe’s position on gun control worth  adding to the sum total of human unhappiness? I doubt it.

Don’t wallow in misery.

Do something instead. Think about your desired outcome for the world, and work toward that, even if only in your smallest personal actions.

Foster genuine kindness. Let people have a voice, even if you don’t like what they say. Align your own habits better with your values. Research and support ethical charitable organizations who can enact your values on a larger scale. Reconsider personal habits of consumption to make more room for others. Meditate on peace and love, and what those things really mean in this world. Be gentle with people who are so very afraid.

There are fifty books in a pile in my floor.

These aren’t just any books–they’re the books that used to be my identity. My whole world. Every anxiety. Every dream.

In short, my teaching materials and my dissertation research.

I wrote, by the way, a great dissertation, about a culturally relevant topic that I still care deeply about. I finished graduate school promptly on time, with the requisite checkboxes checked. If I’d done it ten years earlier, I would have a successful academic career now. But I didn’t, and I don’t. Honestly, I have very few regrets.

It’s taken me a long time to let go of this huge physical presence, though. How much of my past can I excise, without it being too much? Can I get rid of this stuff, without fracturing myself in some incurable way?

Today, the answer was finally YES.

 

Interrupting my regularly scheduled non-photographic musings to bring you Antique Dolly’s long lost clothes:

Antique Dolly belonged to an elderly relative, distant enough that I’m not sure how old Dolly really is. My father’s oldest sister, who is considerably older, married an older man. Dolly belonged to either his mother or his grandmother.

I’m not sure if these clothes are her originals. I’m honestly not even sure if her china torso, arms, and feet are attached to her original body. The clothes are mostly made by machine, but the mismatched lace trims–surely scraps from other projects–suggest it was done at home. The pleats were sewn into the fabric before it was cut to shape. The clothes go off and on with a very simple drawstring, so I doubt that Dolly had many suits. Given that she was wearing pantaloons, two petticoats, and a skirt, but only one layer of blouse, I suspect that a jacket was lost at some point. Her jaunty red ribbons are so tattered and fragile that I can’t tell how many there even are.

Dolly herself now wears a replica suit in pink satin, sewed by the aunt who passed the doll along to me.

For a long time I couldn’t find the original clothes, but today an old decorative box on top of a bookshelf caught my eye, and there they were.

If sewing interests you at all, click through to my Flickr feed for many more details.

I’ve been compulsively reading this beautiful blog featuring Japanese folk textiles. Many of these items are mended on top of mending on top of mending–a legacy of rural poverty but also of a culture and an era that disliked waste. When you harvested, spun, wove, and died fibers yourself, fabric was a precious thing.

Economies around the world adopted mechanized spinning and weaving at different paces. In England middle- and upper-class women had completely outsourced making woven fabric by the mid-1830s (in pre-industrial England, weaving was usually sent to a skilled tradesman, but threads were spun at home.) Other European countries held on to skilled weaving a bit longer, especially in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Asia is sadly outside of my historical purview, for now. There are various hand spinning and weaving (or knitting) cultures that still exist today, although a culture would need to be quite remote to subsist on 100% locally hand-produced fabric.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried spinning, but it is not fast. A good hobby spinner with a wheel might turn out a few hundred yards of wool knitting yarn–which is much heavier than most weaving yarn–in a day. Wool is the easiest fiber to spin. Cotton spinning is considered too tedious and technical for most people who are spinning by choice. This article lays out some of the process of preparing and spinning linen fiber. Hemp and linen have the added bonus of being hard on your hands, at every stage. Knitting from a commercially prepared linen yarn leaves red gouges in my fingers; I can’t imagine spinning it. The spinning wheel is, by the way, a vast speed improvement over the older (but concurrently used, and still used by many indigenous fiber cultures) drop spindle.

And that’s one phase of fabric production. There’s a reason time is so commonly envisioned as a thread.

The fact that modern women in industrialized societies can live their entire lives without doing any part of fabric or clothing production is literally stunning when you put it in a historical context. We’ve picked it up as a hobby, of course, but for our entire clothed history, minus the last two hundred years, making and processing fabric was the primary job of almost every woman in clothes-wearing cultures.

Not only do we not make clothes, we don’t maintain them once we have them. Darning, patching, and mending are skills that are even rarer than spinning, knitting, and weaving. Many modern fabrics aren’t even really capable of being mended, and are in fact designed to be worn for only a short time. I’m looking at you, Lycra that looses its stretch after a year.

I’m not in a hurry to make all of my own clothes, don’t get me wrong. This is just food for thought in our culture that throws away prodigious quantities of textiles every year. If that shirt represented a month of your life, instead of $15, would you do something besides put it in the trash bin? Would you have bought it in the first place?

I had to take my car in for major repairs last week. This required driving my husband from the mechanic to his job, and then killing time all day until I could go pick him up. We didn’t know for several hours that the repairs were as extensive as they turned out to be, or I could have wound up somewhere besides an anonymous strip mall. As it was, I found myself needing to recreationally shop. The very largest of big-box stores were open before 9AM; nothing else was.

As I meandered the aisles of Big Box Store That Shall Remain Nameless, I was increasingly depressed. I didn’t need anything. I didn’t even want anything. Everything that I looked at on the shelf basically jumped up and down proclaiming itself to be junk. And not only junk, but junk made at high human and environmental cost. In the end, I bought a new LED lightbulb to replace our lone holdout incandescent and a tube of Arnica gel. I don’t know how much I needed either of those things, but it was just weird.

Afterwards, I sat in my car, drinking the coffee I’d brought from home. It was a delicate math–“How long can I sit here before parking lot security comes to get me?” When I felt like I was pushing the envelope, I went down to the next store. It turns out, there’s nowhere to sit in the suburbs.

Two days later I found myself at that glorious American Mecca, the Indoor Shopping Mall. It was Saturday, and we’d gotten delayed until the place was packed. We bought two things that could just as easily have been purchased online–a computer cable and a dress shirt for my husband–but the shirt needed to be tried on and it seemed silly to ship things that I could buy after a ten minute drive.

There was an element of pointless torture in all of this. At the same time, though, I think it’s valuable to not completely displace oneself from consumer culture. I could have ordered my lightbulb and my arnica gel and my computer cable from Amazon.com, and they would have been here in two days. I wouldn’t have needed to brave the horror that is a busy Apple store on a Saturday. It’s kidding yourself, though, to say that by purchasing things online you aren’t participating in the Saturday mall crush or helping to build that strip of suburban big-box stores. It’s just a secondary distancing from the uncomfortable parts.

I would never dare to suggest that you go to the mall regularly. After all, the danger of recreational shopping is that you buy things you don’t need, and one does value sanity. But, I think it’s a worthwhile insight to drop in from time to time.

The other thing that we should be asking ourselves, as people who are easily outraged by deforestation/extinction/the virtual enslavement of developing nations/the oppression of the poor in our own country:

How am I complicit in that? 

Because we are.

It isn’t a big thing. There are big questions, of course, and small ones. But mostly, this one:

Why do we (I) often let ourselves (myself) live so far from our own values?

I know a family who considers themselves to be devout Christians. Church three times a week, homeschooling, all that. And the Dad drives a Mercedes Benz sports car. I want to jump up and down and scream–what do they even preach in your church?

But I don’t, because I do the same things. I justify my consumer excesses because, compared to a lot of women, they aren’t that bad. I haven’t bought a pair of shoes in a year. I never eat fast food. I rarely buy chocolate. I still buy, buy, buy, though, even while my ideologies lean toward the minimalist and the environmentally-conscious.

I’m not good at separating need from want about the small things. Do I need the fancy beeswax-infused alternative-plastic-wrap I ordered last week? How about the fourth kind of sunscreen I’ve tried this year? Stress-relieving bubble bath? A new blouse, because they were on sale and my nice clothes are getting old? That bottle of perfume that I’ve been eyeing for the last six months? A new tube of lipstick, in this season’s color?  The stuff I threw in with my hair product, to justify the price of shipping?

I think I need a new question for shopping. Need/want obviously doesn’t work well for me–I’m an over thinker; I can talk myself in and out of anything. How about Is this the way I want to live? 

that we’re somehow above advertising. Smart consumers, we are. We don’t buy things just because the TV tells us to.

And maybe we don’t. It seems like most of the ads on my TV, whenever I turn it on, are for things that I don’t purchase, or don’t purchase spontaneously. Car insurance. Baby diapers. Kid’s toys. Medications of various kinds. Cheap beer. Fast food. Department or chain stores that I try to avoid.

On the other hand, I was lazily scanning our fridge-door grocery list this morning as I poured coffee. My attention was really elsewhere. Until I spotted “Egg McMuffins” on the list. What? Nobody here eats ham. My double take proved that what it actually said was “E. muffins.” That being English muffins. Being skeptical of eggs from fast food places even when I was a young thing who still ate such means that I have never eaten an Egg McMuffin. I have, on the other hand, gone through a few English Muffin phases, even making them myself for a while.

Yet still, there in my subconscious, the advertisement for a food product that I have never eaten is what fills in the gaps.

I’ve been reading a lot about Zero Waste these days. (Highly recommended: Edward Humes’ Garbology.) Every zero-waster worth their salt will tell you that buying in bulk is the answer. No more packaging! No waste! Reuse your own container!

It’s great; don’t get me wrong.

But, you have to think. 

The line in the sand that I see drawn a good deal between regular thrifty people and true believers in zero waste is liquids. Liquid products like soap, shampoo, and oils can be very hard to find in bulk. Going out of your way to get bulk soap is some kind of zero waste rite of passage.

I ran across this mythical beast in the wild the other day–the bulk soap dispenser. And it was a commercial gallon-sized, or maybe slightly larger, container of Dr. Bronners. How much waste does it save, exactly, to buy bulk soap from a two gallon bottle, instead of walking around the corner and buying the (readily accessible, no special trips required) one gallon version on the shelf?

Example two: I watched, with my own two eyes, the employees of my local Whole Foods filling the maple syrup dispenser. And what were they using? The half gallon of store-brand syrup in a plastic jug that I could buy off the shelf. Again, how much waste is being saved? How much of it is just being handled by someone else, passing the buck out of your house (and, I might add, your careful recycling)?

Especially if you live in an area where stores frown upon reusable containers, you need to think about the packaging it took to get something into the bulk dispenser and weigh your options. Driving two hours to pump my liquid soap and shampoo from a big plastic bottle into a little glass one, instead of just buying the big plastic bottle myself, is hardly saving the world.

When I was a kid, I adored my small town library. It might have been a thousand square feet, and by the time I went to college I had read a significant portion of their books.

In graduate school I became an academic library snob. (I’ll confess now that I still can’t navigate the Dewey Decimal system with a quarter of my Library of Congress proficiency.) When I graduated and lost my access, I felt pretty bereft, but I was also going through a difficult phase with books.

Lately I’ve come back around to the public library, partly because my library has really awesome services. When we moved here, I went to my closest branch, where I had the same kind of disappointment I always have with public libraries–I tend to read off-the-beaten-path, and it just doesn’t make sense for the library to keep a lot of those books. I realized, though, that I can instantly download e-books, where the selection is pretty decent. I can place holds for those e-books if somebody else has the library’s copy. (I’m looking at you, person who won’t finish the Miss Marple book I’m waiting on.) I can download audio books and “borrow” electronic music. I can also, with one click, request books from the main branch, which is hard to get to in person, and the library will e-mail me when they arrive.

If you stopped going to your local library because they never have what you want, it may be time to start looking again.

As for me, I’m going to keep a running tally this year of books I got from the library instead of purchasing. At the end of the year, I’m going to add up the money I saved and donate a percentage to the library.