bellascribe

It’s the insidious influence of the subject lines of spam (a road not long,that is). Here is a beautiful spoetry line:

again find bad beautiful immediate love

It is nearing time for me to go home. Checking email. C sends me the Turkish proverb: No road is long with good company. This is romantic and sweet, for I, like most other Americans — look at the cars you pass; you’ll see; almost all occupied by no one but the driver — will be driving solo. Guilty.

Finished reading Judith Levine’s Not Buying It (My Year Without Shopping). Quick read, well worth it. She discusses the concept of the Genuine Progress Indicator:

To gauge how an economy is doing on the human-happiness scale, Redefining Progress (the same outfit that came up with the Ecological Footprinting) has developed an alternative to the gross domestic product, called the Genuine Progress Indictor. Instead of adding up all the dollars spent in the economy, as the GDP does, the GPI enters in the asset column the value of unremunerated time spent on housework, child care, and volunteering. Deficits include “defensive expenditures” such as hopital bills for car accidents, prison costs, and the “depreciation” of old-growth forests. As you can imagine, America’s GPI does not look as rosy as its ever-expanding GDP.

Speaking of not buying it, I will buy this book. (Checked the copy out from the library — that’s our system these days with books; we have way way too many and way way not enough space, so if the book doesn’t come by way of review copy or gift, we check it out of the library, most often via interlibrary loan first, then decide if we want to own a copy, according to parameters more involved than I care to go into at the moment.)