Just announced: 50 billion planets in the Milky Way. 500 million of which could possibly support "life" as we know it.

Chinese New Year parade reminded me once again how cultureless I feel. It's fun being an American and celebrating everyone else's cultures, but what is our tradition? How would someone celebrate America in 500 years? Wearing cheap, ill-fitting clothes from the Gap and wandering around zombie-like from our day jobs?

It was fun to see all the city officials lead off the parade, as if no celebration could occur without a successfully run city. Police got a 3/4-hearted round of applause too. Apparently we have a new (interim? Nonelected?) mayor!

I need to think more about my financial plans tomorrow in advance of my followup meeting with my financial planner. Swallow, good.

“Fatih Birol, chief economist with the International Energy Agency, has said, “We should leave oil
before it leaves us.” I agree. If we can phase out the use of oil quickly enough to stabilize climate, it will also facilitate an orderly, managed transition to a carbon-free renewable energy economy. Otherwise we face intensifying competition among countries for dwindling oil supplies and continued vulnerability to soaring oil prices. And with our recently developed capacity to convert
grain into oil (that is, ethanol), the price of grain is now tied to that of oil. Rising oil prices mean rising food prices.”

http://www.earth-policy.org/images/uploads/book_files/wotebook.pdf

In a really weird mood thanks to a V-day conversation with a certain London breaker of peace. I thought asking about the weather would be a neutral enough question, but it opened up a shitcan of worms. Being a natural planner and enough Virgo, I get unnerved by the thought of moving toward a chaotic, catastrophic climate-change-propelled future. But the Aries in me loves the challenge of facing an unknown and conquering. I find that the men I have been spending time with lately are these high testosterone, thrill-seeking warriors that are all in some kind of potentiality flux. Maybe I'm looking for these fucking mirrors right now because I am redesigning my life.

Unfortunately, after 9 years of grounding, I'm not willing to chain myself to a boring 9-to-5er again, so I'm stuck having to deal with amplified feelings of chaos and uncertainty in the people I choose to talk to and hang out with. Not that I don't have a plan, at least for a good portion of this year. It's the good portion of my life that is totally up in the air. It's like when I quit my job at Chevron and asked myself "Where do I want to go and what do I want to do, if ANYTHING and ANYWHERE were possible." And the question totally overwhelmed me, so I pussied out, moved to San Fran near the BoyF and put too many cards on the massage table. I think I was actually on the right track with the federal government work and the hammer coaching. Those were conscious, passionate choices I manifested. When you create a business, you create a universe, a process, a system of laws. You have to be committed and ready to run it like you are its God. It's a world on your shoulders, and if you are not running with it, it will crush you.

So do I want to start another business right now? Hell no! Only a fool would aspire to run a business without a strong vision and an end-game. Just sayin'. From experience.

My financial planner is challenging me to think of my future now too, which I honestly haven't done seriously, and never in alignment with what my true self really wants and needs. It's a challenging time of self-discovery. I'm learning a lot. That's the point.

I want to talk about my sex and relationship life eventually because I think it is equally revealing and brim-full of lessons, just have to give it some more thought as to how to present it. Hmmmm. Sometimes I wish people weren't so damned human.

I just got a memo under my hotel room door informing me that there is a shortage of power in New Mexico, and that I am being asked to lower my room temperature by 10 degrees. I happily obliged. It was almost refreshing to have an upscale hotel such as Embassy Suites ask their members to make a sacrifice.

Albuquerque is no stranger to sacrifice. I lived here two summers, and recall the mayor asking for limited or no lawn watering during periods of drought, and also asking people to limit water usage in homes, such as shower length.

My senior design project in college was the creation of a trash-sorting and biofuel producing facility for our Montana community (Bozeman). We built in an extensive set of machinery and equipment to separate recyclables from compostables from trash. We were asked by a classmate after our well-received presentation, why we didn't consider having people pre-sort their own trash. Our answer was that it was too imposing on the community – we couldn't possibly ask them to do that! Montana was a more individual-based state in terms of its laws and freedoms at that time. Only after moving to California and living in San Francisco did I realize that people were more than willing to separate their own trash! This alone might have made our project feasible in the "real-world."

I'm learning not to underestimate our citizen's capacity for sacrifice, for the common good.