Career Goals: an introspective

The world is white-black and my eyes are liars who’ve not yet betrayed my heart.

Destructive interference in cardiomyopic waves,

Solutions muddled in a Collins glass shaken with two parts rum, one part lime juice and Hemingway’s pen scratching away on a white-black book against this dingy bar,

Drinking until his dreams are no longer paralyzing.

A Hemingway and a Hamlet

Torn in directions by dreams

By dreams, per chance, or by duty

To find calling in the world or to be led, listless, towards a destiny chosen by your father?

It’s a difficult path to pioneer when you head fights your heart,

but where is the path for the heart that fights itself?

A ring with only one boxer has no winner,

Only a point: it is fruitless to try to strike the left hand with the left glove.

By duty am I bound

But lies down this fate no freedom, that is

No delight, that is

No guilt.

By passion am I drawn

But lies down this fate no honor, that is

No fidelity, that is

No rancor.

Butter-rum skin on universal white-black canvas

melting indecisively as though relativity were a joke everyone is in on but me:

An imposter-scribe of my own life events

Fighting the shadow of the thoughts that create me

Betraying the cardial crossroads when my eyes sneak a glance at one of a million possible destinations.

Keystone XL Pipeline VETOED!!!...And why this isn't as good as it sounds

I'm someone who considers herself to be deeply connected the environment that surrounds my home. When I heard about the Keystone XL Pipeline and all of it's not-so-secret detrimental effects to the environment, I took up arms and banners against it. I protested and posted blogs.  I let my friends on social media and the poor interns at my senators' and representative's offices have it.  I was angry.

I still am.


1) The Keystone XL Pipeline infringes upon thousands of acres of valuable corridor habitat. These places allow migratory species to rest and refuel before continuing their journey to their summer or winter homes.

2) KXL carries the severe potential to leak.  While the the organizations who have vouchsafed the material that the pipeline would be constructed out of, they either could not or would not test the junctions, which is where most major leaks occur.

3) The process to extract and refine tar sands oil is inefficient and costly.

4) The "thousands" of jobs created are part-time and does not create a sustained job market.

BUT...Who is invested in this project?

If we just look at the list above, you see 2 investors:
            1) The United States (Government and People)
            2) Canadian Fuel Market

But (hold onto your socks, they're about to get knocked off) we're not the only ones who matter in a global market.

Are we honestly so arrogant to think that if we stop KXL from being built that Canada will just say, "Oh, OK. If the US doesn't want our oil, then we just won't develop this highly coveted resource"?

I was. I thought about my home.  Nebraska farmers and city-folk alike came together and submitted claims of unconstitutionality against KXL.  I thought about about the sandhills and the bluffs and the rivers, all unique environments desperately needed by the migratory birds that we are so famous for in early spring.  I thought about my air and water quality and the economy that I participate in.

But, in the grand scheme of things, I don't matter.

Let's give ourselves a brief pat on the back, U.S.  Even though we are still far from acceptable, the United States has set, maintained, and (more importantly) enforced certain environmental standards that are among the best and most rigorous in the world. And that's just on a federal level. State-wise, there can be additional regulations and consequences to reduce contamination and detrimental development.  (Insert happy dance).

But don't get too happy. In 2010 study, we still ranked 25th out of 25 developed and typically Western countries with environmental standards.  And, if we are so low, imagine the types of standards and level of enforcement (or, perhaps more fitting, lack thereof) in less developed countries or in those countries that are even more isolationist than we are.

Let's look at China, another heavy hitter and high bidder for this valuable, but dangerous resource. In a very brief comparison summary of Chinese vs US air quality standards, you can see that Chinese air contamination (and lack of strict environmental regulations) severely affects the quality of life of the people, especially children, living there. Primary school students have to be taught how to breathe shallowly in order to minimize their exposure to pollution.

Now let's get hypothetical:
The US has broken off all ties to Canada's tar sands oil.  We've explicitly stated we will not permit it within our borders.  China, now the highest bidder, gets the oil.
              Problem 1: Oil can only be exported to China via oceanic oil tankers. Great.  Before we even get the fuel to China, we have to deal with an increased risk of oil spills in the Pacific. 
Once the oil gets to the various Chinese plants and stations that require it, it is burned.
             Problem 2: Depending on the location of these plants/stations, environmental regulations cannot be reliably enforced. Cool. So, omitting the disastrous levels of pollution that get put out in the extraction and refining processes AND  the pollution and risk of spills to get the oil to these plants/stations [both of which hold similar variables in the US's version of this equation], there might not be any actual environmental regulation on how much of this oil can be burned at once/how to get rid of any dangerous by-products/etc...

In this hypothetical situation, the net negative of the US not having KXL outweighs the net negative of the US building KXL.  In this situation, one of many like it, the US was actually globally irresponsible in refusing the oil.

Back to the point: the president vetoed the bill to approve the construction of KXL today.
For the US regional ecosystem, this is undoubtedly a win.
In order for it to also be a win on a global scale, we have to look past our economy, our environment, our small but significant lives.
At the grandest scale, we need to eradicate the need for oil.
At the present scale, we need to eradicate the need for this particular Canadian tar sands oil.

Vespers (A collection of 3 poems)

I. A sentence

, which is not to say that I am lacking in that respect, but rather that my voice, a voice that relies on a pair of inherited chromosomes, the eternal promise that this air, the same air we’re sharing, will always be able to vibrate and carry those vibrations and transfer them to the hidden receptacles within your body so that you can interpret them, and not an insignificant amount of chance that my shaking voice will match to patterns you are familiar with – but of course you must be familiar with them as you are human and I am human and our humanities allow for a certain amount of innate understanding of one another unless you are, well, you know those people to whom I refer; there is a difference between talking and speaking and it lies in the fact that for one, there is no purpose, and for the other, the purpose is complex, evolving, and inviting others to eventually join a larger conversation over something that is personally meaningful and to somehow have to convey these abstract ideas and words by means of voices over which we have no control,

II.An Afterthought OR My views on the purpose of existence

(                          )

III.My Poem

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.” – Oscar Wilde

I speak with words not my own.

Who owns each syllable, each sound that drops from my lips like diamonds and diamondbacks?

Each hiss of breath,

hiss of hot lead

feverishly melting in delicate patterns on paper,

who owns this?

The writer has the fever,

infects her audience with its heat,

but the fever belongs to the disease which has come before,

and will come again,

though an age may pass in between of curséd health.

It’s the cacophony of teeth,

the smell of sweat and stale vomit,

the neatly simmered rage,

all of these things of mine,

that plagiarize the playwrights and philosophers of old,

those rulers of the Golden age of thought and reason and linguistic innovation,

who, in turn, plagiarized the divinity of the planets they could see,

somehow turning them into a mockery of a representation in the process.

But the planets are mere shadows in the background of some ancient man’s cave painting

and in the foreground is the only truth he knows:

the immediacy of his situation and,

unable to see past his need and into the future, he

like me,

speaks with words not our own.