mishanyni...

{listen bun-nehs this time!}

I took the ecological footprint test again to see if my new living situation has improved it any, and happily, it has decreased from a footprint score of 4 to 3, and the usage of 2.2 planets to 1.7 planets.

CATEGORY GLOBAL HECTARES FOOD 1.1 MOBILITY 0 SHELTER 1.1 GOODS/SERVICES 0.8 TOTAL FOOTPRINT 3
	IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 8.8 GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON. WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 1.8 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.
	IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 1.7 PLANETS.

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In other news, I am pleased to report that I did read some of poetry aloud last night at the Blood Ink gathering, even though a large portion of the crowd were definitely behaving (& writing) like hipsters and beatniks (which I am now calling 'hipniks'). But I read Her Mother's Dress and Rusalka, and did not cry, or die, or twitch too much. My voice did not sound too bad either, no helium-mice. My poems liked escaping into the space of the room... & people did clap. It was good practice. I think I might just do it again sometime.

It was certainly an anthropological experience, listening to the others.. I did very much enjoy one boy's story called On Liberation Avenue, which can be found in this issue of their zine; he had a very pleasant, pensive reading voice. & another girl had sweet little poems, little morsels of good. Another girl sang a poem to her broken-old guitar, a capella with a voice like Serena Ryder.

But then there was a lot of that grandiose stuff. the 'i-am-a-tortured-dramatic-soul-who-is-smoking-and-drinking-angsting-&-sexing-too-much' stuff. Only one boy actually bothered me though -- he was just so misogynist. & even his poem about loving a typeface (helvetica!) objectified women. Also, his symbolic misappropriation of red kozak boots annoyed me. Bah!

(Bryna & I were talking about how so many love poems always have pronoun reference -- gendering the subject & object -- and how we like much better the ones that address 'you' & it becomes universalized, and the sentiments & images are then more important than the actors. They can then be any gender.)

But I digress. What else -- there was a man who sounded like he narrated 1970's filmstrip natural history documentaries, I think -- he had such a voice-over voice, where he should be saying something ''And there, among harsh wasteland of the forsaken tundra, a crocus struggles to be reborn anew into the kingdom of spring.'' You know the sort. An older woman writing very very clichéd erotica as if to prove that 'old ladies can say fuck, too!' & then the most confounding performance by a girl who was jumping around & acting like a floofy comedienne who began to rap about Fort Edmonton Park. I can honestly say I've never seen anything like it. It was all quite surreal.

* * *

That is all, I think. Oh -- this is quite an interesting article, about what we remember, how personal memory and public memory can be two quite separate things, and how severe the changes in one's life must be for a public event to imprint itself personally. (e.g. civil war for many years, like in Bosnia) The professor discusses how 9-11 (despite the media hype, the constant references to it) doesn't seem to have had that effect, even in New York City.

Perhaps this tendency to focus on the mundane personal details is a survival mechanism, that we choose not to remember certain historial happenings with the same detail because of what a burden those memories would be. When terrible things happen & don't drag on (the way a war would) we try to move on as quickly as possible. I wish the author would have examined more about the idea of memories (or lack there of) as psychological survival, talked about PTSD, etc. as well as how some memories we hold to for inspiration. To keep us going, not just as markers in time.