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lifeisshrug · 7 years

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science march 4-22-17

i’m not marching today. The science march is overtaking DC and it’s earth day but yet i’m #optinginside. Bill Nye is there, as is questlove (main MC??). CEO of Nature Conservancy is there. Most of my friends are there. Not me, today. Not really sure why. Wanting an indoor day to myself, mainly. I’d also really like to be perched out aside a stream in the middle of the woods and just watching life pass me by, but I’m not up for the struggle of getting to a destination with parade traffic, nor do i really long for congested trails full of newbs and tourists.

It is also a rainy day and i worry that my outdoor toughness is softening; perhaps i just don’t want to get rained on? Pull yourself together, man.

Yesterday was a normal friday at work, except that it was a busy morning (annoyingly, thanks boss); had lunch in the sun; procrastinated in the afternoon; ditched at about 4 and met Grace in the sculpture garden fountain on constitution. we sat in the sun and talked about her people watching (she’d had lunch with adriane and stuck around in the city). She’d written some stream of consciousness stuff (we’re currently trying to write some songs together) about wishing she could stop protecting her heart, and wishing she could do away with her plans and escape and go on adventures. She mentioned the man on the street, that she’d left out something he said: “all my thoughts are noble thoughts because all my thoughts are moral” or something like that. She’d told a friend of this sentence, and the friend suggested grace and i’s band be called “Noble Thoughts,” which i thought was neat and better than any water-themed thing i could have thought up. i left her at the metro station on Pennsylvania and 7th; she was having a yoga-class friend stay the next few nights, as she was between places. I brought up homelessness; Grace inquired, and hoped i’d share my experience working on that at another time. Looking forward to seeing Hurray for the Riff Raff with her Sunday.

Grace’s voicemail, upon encountering the man: alright, listen. so iwas just walkin home from yoga class, walkin down the street, with my yoga mat in my backpack. and on the other side of the street there’s this old man in a red blazer and a red american flag hat with the tags still on it and a big old beard and a guitar, sitting on the park bench waiting for the bus across the street. He looks like a homeless guy. And he yells at me “hey you, you there! watcha got in that backpack?” and i said “welp, its a yoga mat.” and he said “well i thought it was a musical instrument! Can you fit a musical instrument in there?” And I said “well, I sure do, i got a kazu and spoons and..” he says “well come on over here and lets sing us a song!” So i went on over there and i brought out my spoons and my kazu anddddd (laughing) and show them off to him a little bit. and he says “well that’s great!” and he tells me that he’s just come from the Railroad Evangelists Society where they talk about evangelizing the lord and model trains. And he keeps talking about this and i tell him im a unitarian and don’t believe in evangelizing and he said “well i used to be a unitarian too until i met my devil wife; she’s dead now, bless her, and to everyone else it was a blessing.” and he starts telling me about life and std’s and a second wife and that he liked to sleep around...” and he was a hoot. it was really funny. and i said ‘you know i gotta go, so lets sing a song and ill be on my merry way. so he gets out his guitar and says you’ll know this one; and he starts playing his guitar and it is soooo out of tune that you can’t even pretend that it’s in tune, but he keeps playing as if he doesnt notice; and he starts singing a song and the bus pulls up and i say “sir nice to meet you but i gotta get on” and winked at the bus driver as i walked away. anyway, i wanted to tell you that. He gave me his address in case i wanted to write him letters, and so that we can look him up to jam sometime, if you’re interested. *laughs* ok, bye.

Last night was beer club. I brought along the new belgium ‘tartastic,’ a light lemon ginger sour and trekked over to Emily’s new apartment on 3rd and I, with Sam. I also brought along my empty can of Pure Water Brew (by clean water services). Clara joined. It was the usual gang -- carlos, emily, sam, les, monica and josh, and the rest of josh/carlos’ friends who i still don’t really know that well after all these months. the theme was “green beer” in time for earth day. So when it was my turn, i started rambling about the ingredient that is most central to beer -- water -- and basically explained the crux of the issues I’m working on at EPA in order to paint a picture, and then explained that the Pure Water Brew was the perfect beer with respect to not contributing to those problems; and i explained my lament that i could not actually share it with anyone. Somebody asked if folks could one day get over the stigma of drinking beer made from poop water, and i smiled big and said “YES! And i’ll tell you why! Think about the water system we have. When you flush or whatever, all that water goes to the community wwtp, where it is cleaned to pretty paltry standards, and then released into the river -- millions of gallons worth a day -- and then the next town downstream sucks it in and makes their drinking water out of that. By the time potomac water gets to DC Water’s drinking water intakes, it’s supposedly gone through 7 or 9 people already. and so when folks ask me the poop water question, i simply say, ‘dammit, we’re all already drinking it anyway!’” and it went over pretty decently, actually. Anyway, people cheered for my “ted talk” and i was glad i brought it up, even though i’d only given it a little thought so my coherence wasn’t where it needed to be. the rest of beer club was a hoot, and we played with the pug Frank (emily’s roommates’) until we lost him; until we realized his momma had just snagged him. Everyone’s beer pitches were top notch and the voting was convoluted as ever (went with the “French” model of elections); Beer club is never a bad time.

I quickly typed out my thoughts regarding the “ted talk on water and beer” that i started rambling about during beer club:

***

Given that we're doing green beer, it's earth day, and my beloved EPA is waiting in line for the guillotine at the moment. I wanted to talk a little bit about the ingredient that composes 99% of beer: water. Not only is this a key component of beer and almost every other commodity known to man, but it's also my trade so I want to rant about it a little bit.

What i am about to say is true about the entire world since the dawn of "civilized" man and industry, but it is particularly applicable to the US since 1492. According to the people of the united states, the US government, and private business, waterways have been one thing and one thing only: garbage cans. While large, navigable waterways have been thought of as passages for travel, all surface water bodies -- lakes, streams and rivers -- have been used primarily as the garbage cans of a productive society. Nearly everything that can be bought and sold in the US relies on intakes of surface water for the manufacturing process, and subsequently the disposal of used water back into the river, stream or lake. From factories producing batteries and Teslas and RC car toys and paper and pens and steel and plastics and cardboard and rubber garbage cans and blue jeans, to hog farms and paper mills, to coal power plants...all of these require an input of "clean" water, and during the manufacturing process, that clean water becomes dirty, and that water is treated to a minimal standard and then put back into the river or stream.

Consider the battery factory: they rinse their machinery and battery casings with water and create ionized metallic solutions for dipping, among other things; and the result is brine water full of arsenic, nickel, varieties of sodium. Take a coal fired power plant: water is drawn in to keep the smokestacks cool, and also to become steam which powers the turnbines that generate the electricity. It creates waters containing high levels of mercury, arsenic, lead, selenium, and other metals. My boss actually just led the rule writing to regulate to what standard coal plants have to clean that water before discharging it, and it became law in the last year, but now Pruitt is moving to erase it. But anyway, In both examples, the water is treated to remove part of the metals to the standards Congress allows EPA to set -- which are not stringent -- and then put back into the river.

And how could I forget poop! Whenever you flush, wash dishes, shower, laundry or whatever, that gets sent down the line to the community wastewater treatment plant. The solids are removed from the water, the water cleaned to the minimal accepted standard, and then "discharged" back into the river. And that discharge heads on downstream. So consider how our urban areas are set up. You have communities up and downstream of each other. So discharges from communities upstream remain in the water available for those downstream. Pretty elementary stuff, right? But this highlights a fundamental flaw in our system. You see, pollution /discharges were completely unregulated in the United States until 1948 and only then marginally until the 70's. That's the Clean Water Act that we know today.

The problem with it is two-fold: first, we expected that we don't need to treat discharges to a very safe standard, because when we sucked the river water back in downstream, we could just treat the crap out of it and human health would be fine. That worked a 100 yrs ago, when clear water that didn't smell bad was assumed safe. But now our technology to detect specific contaminants is so much better, and we realize that cleaning crappy water (no pun intended) is actually really hard to do and expensive. Cleaning out hormones and nitrates, or microscopic plastic shedded from synthetic clothing in the washing machine, is super hard to treat, for example. For really big places like DC, DC Water has the economy of scale to afford all this crazy cleaning technology to superclean the drinking water. Which is important, because Potomac river water has been "through" 7 people and god knows how many manufacturing processes before it is treated and sent to your tap. DC Water can basically strip everything out but the hydrogen and oxygen and then literally have to add minerals back into the water to prevent health problems among us DC folks.

But small communities who lack much buying power? They get what they get. If they sit far downstream of a bunch of industrial activity and towns, and they can only afford some basic filters and chlorine, not the gizmos DC water can afford...what's going into their bodies? And this doesn't apply to just the drinking water plants; think about the wastewater plants. Some of them can turn wastewater into water so pure it can be used for anything, including drinking water. But what about communities that can't afford such technology? Many communities in rural areas can only afford what's called "lagoon" treatment -- literally a lagoon that allows sewage solids to settle to the bottom and microbes to partially disinfect the water on top, which then gets sent into the river. That kind of treatment doesn't do much for things like pharmaceuticals and heavy metals that may have ended up in the waste water.

It also does not address nutrient pollution. For those who forgot their 7th grade science, nutrient pollution comes from various sources and is mostly nitrogen and phosphorus. These are the two primary fertilizers required for optimized monoculture plant growth, and they are prerequisites for mankind's existence. But but we also release what consume in some form, and sewage contains tons of n and p. Additionally, in order to assure a sufficient crop yield, the US encourages Ag to use more fertilizer than necessary out of caution; and water events (rain, floods, farm animals like cows walking around in streams) result in this fertilizer, largely intact, running into rivers streams and lakes (along with animal wastes, which contain a ton of N and P). The result of excessive N and P in our waters is excessive microbial growth, like harmful algal blooms (which release neurotoxins into waters that cannot be filtered out, and Sidenote, these have been occurring more frequently on slow moving rivers and lakes near drinking water intakes). N and P are why the gulf of mexico has a dead zone.

And none of this involves other water issues. Everybody knows about flint now. But what about migrant families in the Central Valley of ca, where over fertilizing of crops results in nitrates in the groundwater, which these families must drink, and they boil the water out of fear of contamination, because the community water system is essentially third world, but boiling only concentrates the nitrates, which results in chronic health issues and birth defects? And that EPA wants to help fix that, but families don't bring attention to it because they think federal assistance will get the attention of ICE? And everyone knows about the ground sinking in California from pulling out too much groundwater, but what about the ground sinking in Virginia, of all places, because groundwater is drawn faster than it can be replenished, resulting in more flooding and saltwater fouling coastal groundwater that families rely on for drinking? Or what about mid size communities that can afford to do some innovative things to avoid these issues I'm ranting about, but the water rates are controlled by the city council, and since they want to be reelected, they keep the rates low, which deprived the water system of investment fund and ultimately prevents the community from doing "the right thing" and instead maintaining the status quo -- which is really the story across America, actually.

Anyway, back to that urban model. all this waste water full of n and p and contaminants goes through basic treatment, right? and then most of it ends up in the river. But we have technology now that can pull the N and P out during treatment and turn it back into commercial fertilizer, which effectively reuses it without letting it run downstream, and raises money for the community when it's sold. And we can take the poopy solid waste and turn it into fuel that powers the entire water plant, plus electricity for homes nearby. A few communities can afford these innovations, but most cannot. By capturing those nutrients, it prevents us from needing to import phosphorus from the middle east and other areas (which we need to do, to maintain current farm yields-- and by the way, it's going to run out in the coming years, and yet we're literally letting it flush down the drain...); it also prevents almost all of our n and p ending up on the sea floor in the gulf of mexico, having been discharged and ending up in the Mississippi River. The energy component would reduce how much electricity is required to clean and produce drinking water, which consumes a little over 2% of all electricity produced in the US.

There are so many challenges and opportunities associated with this way of doing things, with obtaining and managing water. One of the big three. Food, water, shelter. It was a beautiful system 100 yrs ago, but now we understand what needs work...and it's gonna cost money we don't have. Meanwhile, those with the least are being affected the most, as I think is typical. It's not all that surprising that EPA spends most of its time helping folks in trump country have safe drinking water and paying for their sewage treatment, and trump is looking to eliminate those funds.

So it's really important to think about what water touches and it's nexus with our daily lives. What am I sending down the drain? How did my food and my clothes and my purchases ruin or improve the water that other people - or God forbid, other creatures -- depend upon? If my city council or utility commission is considering raising the water rates...is it for a good reason? Probably. How can I help get clean and safe water to those who don't have it? Maybe water isn't the loudest of issues right now, but take it from me, water problems are Americas best kept secret. Most scholars call it "Americas largest looming crisis" ...and there's a reason mark twain said "whisky is for drinkin and water's for fighting about."

Which brings me to ways we can help solve these issues! Beer is a great start.

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lifeisshrug · 9 years

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A Sex Talk

Why, as a man, should I be afraid to say no?

These words were said:

Me: “Well, I’m going to go home now.” Her: “I don’t know anyone who would just turn down sex and leave.” ... “I hate you. Fuuuuuuck you” [half laughing, half glaring as I shut the door] ... “I’m just going to snap you pictures of my ass” (once I’ve arrived home, via text).

Let’s pretend a man said those words to a woman:

Her: “Well, I’m going home now.” Him: “I don’t know anyone who would just turn down sex and leave.” ... “I hate you. Fuuuuuck you” [half laughing, half glaring as she shuts the door] ... “I’m just going to snap you pictures of my dick” (once she’s arrived home, via text).

Men are supposed to have this super high sex drive 100% of the time and women aren’t, and men are supposed to “work” on women in order to get them aroused. This is despite the fact that sometimes, women just aren’t in the mood. Sure, maybe the female feels obligated to please anyway, and perhaps this is why and when (wo)man first tasted the human genitalia.

In the last several years there has been a progressive movement -- a “rampant” feminism and renewed discourse about female likes and dislikes, needs, psychological impacts of one’s environment, social norms and institutionally-supported systemic issues, boundaries, self-respect...many suppressed aspects of reality. What it really embodies, unless I am wrong, is a popular discourse where there previously wasn’t one (that is, it was taboo). But as long as we’re having those previously hush-hushed conversations, why is nobody talking about those same things for males? Those same things that need discussion regarding women and other genders also need discussion regarding men.

Not every man wants to have sex all the time. In fact, men frequently do not want to have sex for many reasons. In this society, there’s an enormous pressure to perform, as well as overwhelming norms that prevent men from saying “no” as often as they would. It’s a problem that shaming has perpetuated. But it has been perpetuated even more by a man’s own fear of “intimidating” females (who are perhaps only intimidating via the expectation that he should be able to please them, or is a worthless runt) and self-rationalizations that he should want to have sex and therefore must do it anyway.

In the watered-down pop culture feminist discourse in the US, we are taught that women do not always want to have sex. But more importantly, they reserve the right to say no, and they should not have to provide a reason and they most certainly should not be shamed, or feel ashamed, for expressing their preference in that moment. Men, too, should be able to express their preference at any moment and not be expected to fork over an answer or be admonished and shamed. For while a woman saying no is rejecting her social norm to submit, a man saying no is rejecting to submit also. He decides against submitting to social pressures, which stipulate that he should be a horny man that’s ready to go, especially when offered the rare chance, dammit! But physiologically speaking, we men are not. While there are outliers, there are also outliers in the other genders.

Or maybe he isn’t rejecting the duties of sex. Maybe he just doesn’t want to have sex generally because his sex drive is low. Perhaps he’s even asexual. Or perhaps his drive just isn’t high in that month or week because of mental illness or trauma or simply because his mind is on other things. Or perhaps he just isn’t in the mood that day. Or perhaps he doesn’t want to give the other person any satisfaction in the same way that women may “punish” males via “sexual starvation.” Or perhaps he’s being asked to perform despite an awkward social arrangement or situation. Or perhaps he’s really nervous because of some bodily flaw he wishes to keep clothed and covered and protected and private. Or perhaps he’s really nervous about undertaking the act of putting his body inside someone else’s, which no self-respecting male takes lightly -- his body, his choice, am I right? Notice that these reasons can be regardless of whether the inquiring person is a strange chick from a bar or his lover of 30 years.

But you know what else those reasons are? None of anyone’s fucking business!

And as such, men should be allowed to say no for exactly the same reasons women should be allowed to say no, or anyone should be allowed to say no. A man should not feel obligated to say yes simply because saying no will make the inquiring person feel remorse, or feel gross, or feel not pretty, or feel sub-par, or most importantly, feel upset. It makes it such that a man who declines sex must know that they've gone and ruined the other person's day by "rejecting" them. And you know, people kill themselves over that shit. It's no small matter. And just as females reserve these rights, saying no should not signal a man’s “lack of interest,” sexually or otherwise, in the inquiring person. If a man politely declines, it should not have to signal anything. But it does. And that’s a fucking shame.

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