Thoughts

Trying to explain why feeling vulnerable is so hard for me. Explaining when I have to stray from my fierce independence and be vulnerable, it's incredibly difficult for me. And when I'm vulnerable and someone doesn't want to be there for me. I crumble, all of the walls of my defenses I've used to deal with people in my life crumble before me. "It's just that, I already have this feeling that I'm a burden" At first just the tightening of the throat happened, and the quiver of tears, but it hit me so suddenly and unexpectedly. Sometimes the faintest words seem so insignificant in your head but when you say them the immensity of their meaning floods over you.  I was embarrassed as my body started trembling and my stomach clenched with tears. "I'm sorry" I said as I shook my hands repeatedly and rapidly to try to relieve the intensity. I realized I kept shaking my hands this way, like someone drying their nails frantically, as if the moti...

Had an assignment to thoughtfully analyze the strengths and downfalls of a climate change contrarian argument. The source given was Singer and Avery 2007. I only had three pages, but I had a lot more to say. Their chapter looks like a war zone now that I got done reading it from all the notes and highlights I wrote. I really find it unfathomable that pieces of shit literature like this get published and people take them at face value. Original Source:  Singer,    Avery. 2007. Chapter 3: Shattered Glass in The Greenhouse Theory. In: Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years. Plymoth: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. p 35-44 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shattered Glass Still Traps Heat Taken at face value, climate change contrarian arguments can have a visceral strength to them. They often use rhetoric implying ad hominem such as “climate change alarmists” o...

 The reason white people can't use the n word is because it is terribly offensive. I tend to make a cross reference to the word queer when talking about this. 50 years ago the word queer was terribly offensive, but over much work and dedication, the LGBTQ community has reclaimed the word as their own, even dedicating fields to "queer studies" and pins that defiantly say "queer as fuck" which I love. When a community reclaims a word that used to be used against them, it makes the word lose power. A similar reclamation has happened with the n word in African American communities. By calling each other it as a way of saying bro or homie, it makes the word lose it's sting. We as white people sound fundamentally stupid using the n word for a variety of reasons. 1, there is nothing cool about white people using a word that relates to a legacy of slavery and slave violence to people who's great grandparents endured years of terrible indentured servitude. Us cal...

Her name was Ashley Atkinson. She held with her the experience of compassion, hardship, and hope of communities in the worst of economic times as she paced in front of the classroom. She had seen families with no access to healthy food. She had shaken the hands of those that worked tirelessly to bring not only food to their communities, but hope and celebration too. She passed her eyes along the classroom as she explained the severity of agricultural uncertainty the future held. She let lose the burdens of her mind; the scarcity of future water, the uncertainty of climate change and drought. “Only one percent of the United States population farms” she said, “and of that one percent, forty percent is fifty five and older”. She looked to us with a half humorous, half melancholy smile and asked “am I scaring you guys yet?” The head of the horticultural department at the college was sitting in the middle of the classroom. She raised her hand and it peaked into the air above the crowd. He...

Original Story:  Muhammad Ali's advice to his daughters...Powerful! An incident transpired when Muhammad Ali’s daughters arrived at his home wearing clothes that were quite revealing. Here is the story as told by one of his daughters: “When we finally arri ved, the chauffeur escorted my younger sister, Laila, and me up to my father’s suite. As usual, he was hiding behind the door waiting to scare us. We exchanged many hugs and kisses as we could possibly give in one day. My father took a good look at us. Then he sat me down on his lap and said something that I will never forget. He looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Hana, everything that God made valuable in the world is covered and hard to get to. Where do you find diamonds? Deep down in the ground, covered and protected. Where do you find pearls? Deep down at the bottom of the ocean, covered up and protected in a beautiful shell. Where do you find gold? Way down in the mine, covered over with layers and layers of rock. Y...

This is a short post, it was just a scary comment so I figured I would share. During my urban agriculture capstone class, the heads of various departments sat in. After having a discussion of the future of agriculture, and the uncertainty of the future, the head of the horticulture department at UW Madison admitted "last summer we were told to throw out our books on agriculture, we had literally never seen anything like it before" Take that combined with the fact that only 1% of the population now farms and 40% of farmers are over 55, and knowledge of farming is being lost at an alarming rate. If we are to deal with the problems of drought and climate change, we're going to have to capture that precious knowledge before it disappears forever.

Religion and science must necessarily be seen as two separate entities, for science seeks to understand the technical aspects of the world and religion seeks to understand meaning, it is only when one errs by attempting to be justified by the other that, for me, it loses credibility. Religion will continue to surpass science in giving woman and man meaning of life, and science will continue to surpass religion in cold calculability. It is fallacious for one to attempt to justify religion or science using the other’s presuppositions. (Science’s presuppositions are that the scientific process is a valid and reliable way of understanding the world. Religion’s presuppositions are that life has meaning and there is a way in which one can attain that meaning best) this isn’t to say however that the two paths cannot sometimes unintentionally collide, as happens often with quantum physics and astronomy, but rather that the very process of science or religion loses its core meaning when i...