OK, let’s talk about frugality. About the “use it up, ware it out, make it do” kind of frugality.
I grew up on one of the last mixed crop, pretty much self sufficient small farms in the U.S. before the rediscovery of the concept in the 1970s by organic farmers. My parents were married pre-WWII at the end of the depression. I was a “get through the diaphram, past the spermacide, damn the menopausal signs, I don’t care if you finished your family of four boys a decade ago” fifth child born to parents in their 40s. Scary, huh? So I pretty much grew up on my own as my parents were already worn out from a lifetime of hardscrabble existence and challenges of raising a family during hard times. I didn’t know that though. I was just a kid. Born at the tippy-top of the bell curve of the post World War II baby boom as the phenomenon was known until the term Baby Boomer was born in the late 1970s I shared by birth month with the likes of Sid Vicious, Scott Adams (Dilbert), Caroline Kennedy, Steve Buscemi, Susan Powter, and Siouxsie Sioux.
My rather unique demographic situation allows me to see and to some extent to understand cultural proclivities a bit further back in time than most of my peers, and I am a bit more aware of potential, and in progress, cultural tangents because of my following of and respect of pop culture as well as my constant monitoring of techno divas. I basically feel like I have a pretty good handle on late 19th Century all the way to the bleeding edge of today.
My furniture doesn’t match. I mix antiques and street art. I have never had so much money that I wanted to buy a dress that cost more than $200. I would much rather have terrabytes of storage than terra nova fashion.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love stuff. I have to fight a compulsion toward collection all the time, although I think it has as much to do with my mother’s insistence that things couldn’t be thrown out because, “We might need it some day” more than any likelihood of me being a hoarder. My mom saved fabric and the ladies at the little country church she attended would cut and sew them and have them woven into rag rugs that were absolutely beautiful to my eyes. Still are. I saved a couple with red stripes to bring out at Christmas.
I’ve had old painted storage shelves refinished professionally to find a walnut, punched tin, pie safe first used by my great, great Aunt Kit in the late 1800s. It is beautiful and useful.
I also find that putting something I really cannot find a use for, such as cabinets from the early 60s that I removed from my kitchen, on the curb will attract the attention of someone who has a use for it, and more impressively, the person who has a use for will nearly always come to the door and ask if it is alright to take it.
So, anyway, to get to the point (something I am horrible at doing) of this post, I have noticed that so much of the frugality that is so trendy at the moment, centers on discounts….. but that requires shopping. Of course all the frugal bloggers have to write about something… and advertisers who pay lots of bloggers for advertising space on blogs have to sell stuff. But, let’s think about this deeply for a day or two: true frugality requires NOT shopping, not buying stuff, not perpetuating the myth of needless need.
Use it up, ware it out, make it do.
Absolutes in Transition
In this series of posts that I began yesterday I am looking at this past week’s significant newsworthy developments with an eye toward what crucial and competing cultural processes are at work in the world today and what they might signify within our culture. These events are:
- the Occupy groups
- the outing of corrupt college sports empires that had been covering up serial child rape for decades
- the ouster of the architect of the institutionalized racism of AZ SB 1070,
- a conservative southern Christian state decided to retain a woman’s right to choose
- a conservative rust belt state decided to reinstate collective bargaining
- And even internationally there are signs that powerful men might not be getting away with morally reprehensible acts (DSK)
We are used to the flux between corporate and non-corporate forces in our American culture, but some trends exist well beyond national boundaries and this is one of them. Corporations and institutions act in collusion to preserve and expand their interests. Banking and energy interests rule the world and have been on the track to do so since the beginning of the Industrial Age.
I’m trying exclude words like power and control in this series as, even though we use them everyday, they are ill defined terms that are of questionable value when we are trying to figure out processes and events. So I’m examining some of the existing, and surprising or emergent, properties of some recent news events beyond simple political, economic, or religious explanations that may be at work behind the scenes at this moment in history.
I’m an intellectual, I make no bones about that, I try to figure things out. I’ve been that way my whole life; I simply cannot help it. I watch, and read, and research, and do not “believe” in absolutes. This has always gotten me in all kinds of hot water because most people, even most of the people who think in the way I do, will not ruffle the feathers of those who believe in absolutes as the absolutists tend to outnumber the undecided folks, and be able to influence outcomes. Those people who believe in absolutes believe the absolutes to be different things, some absolutists believe in a religion, some in science, some are not at all concerned with organizing principles and do what they believe to be best for themselves.
A culture cannot long exist with people who act against their own, individual, best interests. But neither can a culture long exist when individuals collectively act against the best interests of the population to whom they belong.
Finite, well defined populations used to be able to recognize other members of the population to whom they belonged. But this requires a small or at least “countable” population. Within the last couple hundred years there have been massive changes to ALL aspects of human culture. While there has been change as long as humans have organized themselves through language and culture, the pace of change and the territory of change have transformed to such a degree that it is questionable as to whether discrete populations still exist or whether there is truly one population, a situation which has not existed since humans walked out of Africa for the last time.
So what are we doing with this opportunity, and how do we make wise choices about determining what we are going to do and how we react? Next time I will be getting into some of the plausible scenarios behind the why the things that are happening are being noticed and amplified.
Everybody Look What's Going Down
I personally think some “major shit is going down” as we used to say early in my youth. Life doesn’t run smoothly even when it is running smoothly, it comes in bunches, in fits and starts. Statisticians know clusters occur and folk wisdom also shows an appreciation of this in sayings such as, “things happen in threes.”
Most of these patterns are beyond our perception but sometimes we see small segments of them and name them.
Now I’m not going to give too much significance to these occurrences, BUT there does seem to be something happening. Human culture does have patterns that we name. Systems of human organization we have named include: social, political, economic, kinship, religious, legal, technology, and language. All these systems have fluid trajectories and sometimes these system trajectories are at odds with each other. Our economic system is at odds with our political system. One is designed to create surplus and accumulation by the few while our political system supports the distribution of surplus through infrastructure and social programs. Our society arose in an overall environment of plenty where frontiers existed and more bounty was just over the horizon.
But we now have 7 billion people on this earth and we are in the middle of massive planet-wide shifts environmentally that will change every thing. Individuals can chose to believe in whatever they want to, but that is not likely to change the global patterns of which we are but a small part.
Social systems will change if we are to survive. Several systems that have been growing in incompatible directions are readjusting in ways that are difficult for those of us within the system to appreciate. Distribution of influence versus consolidation of influence have been vying with each other for for centuries.
Monarchies are on the way out. But the inheritance of wealth and prestige still very much exists. We no longer think our rulers are gods, but we seem to mostly believe that our rulers have a singular god on their side. We espouse equality, but we look the other way when powerful people rape children. We say that our country is based on freedom and equality, but wealth is consolidated among 1% and the freedom of the individual is waning while more and more groups are asserting their supposed right to inflict their will on the individual. These groups are corporations, religions, and military-economic alliances, yet groups were not supposed to have the same rights as people in this county because the founders were trying to rid themselves of the tyranny of Crown backed corporations that were given massive land grants in the New World as well as the tyranny of state sanctioned religions. People in the newly United States were to be free of corporate rule and free to believe as they wished without state intrusion into religious thought.
What is happening in the U.S. seems like a left leaning realignment toward individual rights with restraints placed on those that would “rule” rather than govern, after an orchestrated power grab over the last few decades by those who would see themselves as “rulers.”
In my next post I will look at this past weeks significant newsworthy developments with an eye toward what these significant and competing cultural processes at work in the world today might signify culturally. These are: Occupy groups, the outing of corrupt college sports empires that had been covering up serial child rape for decades, the ouster of the architect of the institutionalized racism of AZ SB 1070, a conservative southern Christian state decided to retain a woman’s right to choose, a conservative rust belt state decided to reinstate collective bargaining. And even internationally there are signs that powerful men might not be getting away with morally reprehensible acts as Dominique Strauss-Kahn is now being linked to a French prostitution scandal.
16 Days to Learn About and Act Against Gender Violence
16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence is approaching its 21st anniversary with a campaign theme, “From Peace in the Home to Peace in the World: Let’s Challenge Militarism and End Violence Against Women!” The Rutgers site explains that, “Participants chose the dates November 25– International Day Against Violence Against Women- and December 10– International Human Rights Day- in order to symbolically link violence against women and human rights and to emphasize that such violence is a violation of human rights.”
I first learned of this focused time of activism and awareness when I was active in Second Life®, a virtual world platform where avatars create and explore a virtual world. I joined a group there that was actively participating the 16 days events that year, so I learned a great deal about it. There continue to be online events this year as well as ones in the physical world and they are listed here on the Center for Women’s Global Leadership directory of events for 16 Days.. So if you cannot find an event near you, there are online events in which you can participate and information which you can access. I highly recommend informing yourself about the state of gender violence in the world as it is not a subject you will find covered in any depth or breadth in the popular media.
I created an exhibit about women and the violence of war a few years ago on my virtual “island”, The Women’s Center, for 16 days, and I will pull it out of digital storage if I can find the time to set it up in a different virtual world in which I have only just starting creating a village to use as an exhibit and meeting place. If I get this exhibit put up up it will be advertised on a main page sidebar of my site: nfhill.com and I will have instructions on how to access the virtual world platform there.
I will be writing more about gender violence in these coming weeks.
When Rainbows Greet You
Man oh man it was difficult to get through this weekend’s posting schedule. Posting every day is no easy task. If I can get through this month of Nablopomo, which is short speak for National Blog Posting Month, then posting 5 days a week which is my ultimate goal and one of the reasons NaBloPoMo is such a good idea for me to do, will be no big deal. It is just getting into the groove of it that is difficult. Writing in and of itself has rarely been difficult for me, and for that I am very, very thankful. But writing on a schedule has been less than easy at times these past 22 years when I have been raising my daughter. When she needs something I really try to drop everything and be there for her. But just as with writing every day, the task has been met with various levels of success through the years.
“Various levels of success,” I like that phrase. Life is always complex and at times goals compete amongst themselves. Who am I kidding? Goals always compete amongst themselves. Five years ago I was in the middle of a year where I was trying to mother turbulent teen without a map, coming to grips with a marriage that could very well have failed, as well as coming to terms with my own childhood traumas and medical abuse and the depression that has traveled with me throughout my life since those experiences while also helping start a house across the country in Washington, D.C. for women peace activists who wanted to have a place to live and from which to jointly plan and execute congressional visits, actions, and demonstrations, and then having to decide to move across the country away from my husband and daughter to take care of my 92 year old mother in her home for the last few months of her life.
Today I woke up at an ungodly hour and went to the gym to work out with a trainer so that I can regain my health and vigor to the greatest extent possible. I had to be back at my house by 7:15 a.m. so my daughter could take my car to the university. Her car just isn’t safe to drive any longer and isn’t worth the repair cost. But because I was at the gym so early, when I walked to my car after the workout, there were only sprinkles of raindrops coming from the overcast sky. I had missed the deluge that was supposed to be coming early this morning. Tucson’s winter rains are starting early this year. I noted the layers upon layers of gray cloud cover obscuring a view of all but the foothills of the various mountain ranges that surround the Tucson Basin. The sun was just a glowing yellow spot just over the Rincons to the east. Then when I looked west there was a magnificent half arc of a rainbow reaching down to the ground in front of the Tucson Mountains. It pierced a beautiful puffy white cloud half way down its arc, then reappeared and expanded into brilliant, distinct streams of color. I had to smile.
This blog entry wrote itself on the 5 minutes drive home. I bemoaned not having a camera with me, and my phone with its camera was in the trunk even but smiles broke the hold of my inner grump because the week was starting out well after a weekend when the words just didn’t want to come until very late in the day, when I struggled to find them so that I could succeed in my NaBloPoMo goal. I would have a post about how wonderful it is when rainbows greet you in the morning as well as the post I had all ready planned to write for the day done before noon, and I would probably have time to work on my book this morning too. I like success, even little bits of it, as it, along with rainbows and the glow of oxygen in my brain after a work out, help me frame everything in a more positive light.
A Brief Post on Images
Finding the right image for your blog post, brochure, or graphic project need not be expensive. Now admittedly, if you have lots of funds to support your graphic design needs then searches on stock photo sites need not be a complicated task. The more restricted your budget is the more challenging it can be to find images to use.
I always start my search for images at sxc.hu, a site called stock.xchng. Until recently it was an independent site, but it has recently become part the vast Getty Image empire. The site is still comprised of user submitted material to which the copyright holder has control over usage rights for each image.
The most important feature of the site, beyond the huge number of images available, is the powerful search function that allows for up to three keyword searches, a subject category, restrictions on use, image size, photographer, and type of image. The search I always start off with is a keyword with no use restrictions. With just a bit of honing of search terms, I can nearly always find an image the will enhance my post or fill my graphic need.
I heartily encourage use of Stock Xchng.
Even though many photographers do not ask for credit, it is always good to give a link back to the photographers work and let them know where you have used their work so that, if desired, they can show that their work is being used. Helping the photographer build a client list, so to speak, is a great way to thank the photographer or graphic artist for providing work that fits your needs.
Some of my favorite images from the site those used in this post.