Dream Theater

I had a dream that a girl I know and like was madly in love with me; I didn’t want to wake up :(

I wrote a girl a love letter yesterday, poetry included. It was by pen and parchment. She still has not responded. I can only hope for the best.

Grandmother

Last night I dreamt I was watching my grandma’s cats in her apartment and was doing something wrong when she walked in. Her hair was really poofy and dyed a darker color. It was pretty strange, considering I’ve never seen my grandma without grey hair, and she doesn’t have an apartment.

So my family is going through some shaky times since my uncle lost his job. He had a great career, made quite a bit, and was at a stable point in his life (plus I got free food occasionally). But he got fired for not performing well enough. So now he can’t find a job, and my other uncle texted me this morning asking, basically, if my uncle was going crazy, which some in my family are concerned about. 

Aside from this somber note, the academic year is coming to an end, and I am ever so glad. I still have 8 papers to write, 3 of which are research papers, but I think I can handle them. Turkish Club is winding down, thank god, I just want to bow out gracefully. I finished today submitting all my applications for studying abroad, so I should know in a couple weeks the results (I’m sure I got in).

I recently heard the Animal Collective’s “Kids On Holiday” and so I’m ridiculously excited for the summer. I have no idea what it holds, but the idea of not being stressed about school for a few months, and some warmth, are surely only headlights on the horizon.

I’m unsure about a summer job. I didn’t have one last summer, and made it by ok, but was quite bored when my friends were working. I just want a part-time job with decent pay. I feel guilty for passing up a paid internship working on a farm in Rockford. I’d love the experience, the pay ($1500 over the summer), getting tan and buff, and getting course credit for it, but I can’t handle being away from home the whole summer. I miss my friends and leisurely biking too much.

I have so many plans for my house’s property this summer. I’ll basically be landscaping the entire thing. The really exciting things include planting trees, growing my own food, and using a sledgehammer. :) Listing all the landscaping goals I had, I realized that it, in addition to environmental surveying, could be my job for the summer. Working for my mom’s friends could be pretty beneficial financially and socially, since they’ll probably be buying me drinks in a few short months.

Coming home…

…Always disappoints me. 

I come home to see my friends, and they say they’re busy, when I know they’re not.

They never come to visit me at school. They go up to Chicago and, on a side note, expect me to hang out with them. Why would I? Would you give someone extra money for giving you less?

Fuckin’ spam

FROM: RASAQ MUSTAPHA 

Dear Friend,

I got your contact through email business directory and decided to send my 
proposal to you.

I am rasaq Mustapha the first son of Major Hamza AlMustapha the former Chief 
Security Officer to the late head of 
State General Sanni Abacha whose sudden death occurred on the 8th of June 1998.

After the death of the general the Military Government of General Abdulsalam 
Abubakar took over the affairs of the 
Government of Nigeria and started the recovery of Government properties and 
funds from key officer that served 
under the late General including his family, presently his son Mohammed Abacha 
is still in detention. 

Two months later, my father was arrested by security agents, he was charged of 
illegal embezzlement of public funds 
and his involvement in the assassination of Alhaja Kudirat Abiola the wife of 
the June 12 1993 Presidential election winner
(Chief M.K.O. Abiola).

All accounts belonging to my father both local and abroad had been frozen and 
his investments seized by the government. 

Since August 1998 my father hand been in detention and my mother under house 
arrest, and also travel embargo had been 
placed on our family pending the out come of the case, all my fathers friends 
and family members has abandoned us to faith.

During the I'Ldi fitri celebration last year December, I was given the 
opportunity to see my dad, he told me he deposited
two trunk boxes containing US$35m with a security company here in Nigeria and 
that a week to his arrest he instructed 
the company to ship the consignment to UNITED STATES OF AMERICA all in the aim 
of receiving it there himself before 
his arrest that faithful day, according to him the contents of the boxes is not 
known to the Security company as they are 
made to believe they contain government classified documents. 

In the light of this he directed me to look for a foreigner who will assist in 
retrieving the boxes and depositing of the fund 
into an account, hence the need to contact you. I and my mother had agreed to 
give you 30% of the fund for your assistance 
and 5% for any expenses you might incur in the course of this transaction.

I want you to understand that there is no risk involve as we have worked out 
modalities for the smooth actualization of this goal. 

The boxes presently is in a security vault of this company in their offshore 
office in UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 

If this is O.K by you, you can indicate your interest by sending me an email.


Rasaq Mustapha

Changes in the Land

This is a summary paper I recently wrote, I felt like putting it up. The book is by William Cronon.

            Robert Louis Stevenson once said, “The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect.” Can this be said of the colonial establishments of New England and the land exploitation and ecological changes wrought by them? William Cronon, a noted environmental historian, seeks to answer that very question in Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. His work, which started as a seminal paper while at Yale working toward his doctorate, greatly expanded and revised, heralded a reconstruction of the historical view of pre-colonial New England. Most fundamental in this book is its subject, which, though the humans involved were key actors, is the changing environments of the British colonies and the neighboring Native American villages. Forever altering peoples’ perception of the colonial landscape, Cronon states two key concepts: how cultures view property and ownership is a crucial factor in affecting economies and ecosystems; and it is impossible to realistically think about man as distinct from the environment.

            Cronon begins by dismissing two common misconceptions that many today seem to hold about pre-colonial America: it was not a virgin land, full of primeval forest, a pristine wilderness untouched by the hand of man. By the time the Puritans made their voyage across the Atlantic to the New World, more than 10,000 years of Indian habitation and culture preceded them as well as previous explorers. To say that the native indigenous peoples of North America did not influence the natural landscape and biodiversity over thousands of years is simply naïve. It would not, however, be a stretch to say that the Indians could and did indeed live in a relative equilibrium with their natural environment, which was a dynamic system. It is human intuition to take advantage of one’s surroundings, and the Indians certainly never passed a worthy opportunity. At their disposal was a plethora of ecosystems, each with its own climate and distinct organisms, stretching across all of New England. From the northern woodlands to the coastal regions, wetlands, salt marshes, rivers, and streams, were a varying degree of populations and customs regarding food production and harvesting. Indians in the northern woods practiced agriculture during the warm season and depended on the hunt for the winter months. The lands to the south were much more capable of yielding crops due to the more moderate climate. Coastal natives relied heavily upon the bounty of the waters near to land, supplying them with large amounts of shellfish and various saltwater fish. But three procedures were common to all New England Amerindians: fire, mobility, and hunger. The two former are probably the most significant contributions of Indians to the environment. They used fire most commonly to clear the underbrush for hunting paths or to force their prey to a desirable location, but this practice kept local flora populations in check and returned nutrients to the soil as well as preventing large-scale, devastating fires. By staying mobile, the Indians ensured their survival and also reflected their beliefs of ownership. Leaving a plot of land was a simple maneuver and most often performed due to overexploitation of the soil in crop production. Hunger was a familiar occurrence in New England, as Indians would hold festivals to consume all surplus food instead of preserving it for the winter months, though it was not a problem for them, as they had adjusted over time to this custom.

            Upon the Europeans’ arrival to the New World, they saw before them a great land of plenty, ripe with opportunity and freedom. Many wrote home to tell relatives, friends, and investors all that could be had with little labor in New England, many of which were exaggerations. Many early settlers invested little time in agriculture or establishing trade, and starved to death as a result. On viewing the Indians’ consumption and hunting habits, they deplored them as lazy, especially the men, who mostly hunted while the women worked in the fields. Not only did the natives lack industry or large-scale trading, they also had very little regard for formal ownership of property, which they often gave freely. Essentially, “property rights…shifted with ecological use (63),” a concept the colonists saw as foolish and uneconomical, noting that even the most esteemed Indian was likened to a common day laborer in London. Cronon quotes Marshall Sahlins: “there are in fact two ways to be rich…Wants may be ‘easily satisfied’ either by producing much or desiring little (79-80).” The colonists introduced European economic beliefs, taking into account only cost and benefits. Through land transactions and legal documents, they usurped the land from the natives by manipulating the usufruct rights they practiced. In not subduing the land and “improving” it, as John Locke would say, the English felt they had an inherent right to this land. Seeing that they formally “owned” the land, the English crown and its colonial appendage began leasing land to those it believed could produce the highest yield. Land use and agricultural propagation became privatized because it yielded greater results and, in effect, land entered into the commercial realm, and all its products were now commodities to be sold to local and distant markets alike.

            Though Europeans had been traveling to North America for some time, it was not until the colonies were settled, populations concentrated, and more intensive trade was established between them and Indians that European disease, which the colonists were in large part immune to, began to spread amongst the natives. Epidemic swept through Native American populations, sometimes annihilating entire villages, often leaving only a few survivors. Devastation among tribes led to social disorganization and abandonment of villages to escape death, resulting in cultural and spiritual decline. Many colonists saw this as God’s providence at work, and began to cultivate former Indian lands or trading with those clans still left intact. Due to the progressive swelling of English territory, the Indian mobility trends of thousands of years transformed into sedentary lifestyles. Amerindians began accruing wampum, a seashell product, in vast quantities, often using it as currency or held in stockpiles. European trade goods, which had already held the admiration of native peoples, increased in trade with Indians, resulting in indigenous peoples wearing European style dress and using pots, pans, and even muskets. In addition, due to increased Indian hunting for fur to be used in trade, the price fell, trade declined, and many native species went missing throughout New England. Through subtle, gradual changes, the Indians lost much of the symbiotic relationship they held with the land, making it seemingly impossible to return old native ways.

            With the increase of colonial activity came a greater consumption of timber products and the trees themselves. Not only were trees highly valued for fuel, furniture, building, and ships, they were also available in such abundance that colonists became wasteful, taking advantage of a resource scarce in Europe. Because raw materials were plentiful and labor was sparse (the very opposite of Europe), practices were established that maximized labor with little regard for resources. One such example is referred to as “driving a piece (111),” during which they notched trees in a line and felled a desired tree on top of them, leveling a swath of timber, to cushion the desired tree from damage. Some forests were clear cut, picked clean of a single species of tree, then burned or left to rot to enhance the soil for crop production or grazing. Colonists would heat their homes with copious amounts of wood, keeping large fires fueled all throughout the winter. With the increase in logging, sawmill and milldam numbers spiked, as faster methods of timber processing became a necessity in order to ship to local and international markets. Not only did mass deforestation produce a timber shortage, it also changed the very climate of New England. Forests provided a buffer against extreme conditions, giving shade, breaking wind, and holding large amounts of water in roots. As tree populations declined, summers became hotter, winters were colder, and the ground froze deeper. The capacity of the land to hold water fell precipitously, causing sudden surges in runoff that led not only to floods in the wet season, but also to droughts in the dry season; the stored water was released en masse, as opposed to a steady, continuous stream. The end result was dry, poor soil and erratic streams throughout much of New England, daftly interpreted by the colonists as “the progress of cultivation (126).”

            Cronon’s penultimate chapter deals solely with agricultural products, most importantly grazing animals and crop production. Initial numbers of cattle, swine, and goats in New England were negligible compared to the population; colonists wrote investors in Europe, decrying the lack of grazers in the area. The result was a fecundity of grazers brought into and bred to increase population, so much so that there were approximately 4 people for every cow, and innumerable goats and swine. The uses of large cattle ranged from the obvious production of milk and beef to the cultivation of land with the plow, a practice endemic to Europe and entirely foreign to the Native Americans. With the appropriation of grazers came the problem of constraining the animals to the farm, often with detrimental effects to neighboring farms or Indian crops, which the owner must reimburse. Swine in particular became so problematic because, as they could fend for themselves, they were let into the wilderness to fatten on nature’s bounty. They became so menacing to neighboring farms and villages that they were hunted for bounty as wolves, which were also hunted for reward. To prepare land for the spiraling growth of cattle, swamps were drained, native grasses were replaced with more economic foreign sod, forests were felled, and fences were put in place. The entire ecology of the land changed in a matter of weeks or months to a terrain of fields and fences, overrun with weeds and imported pests from Europe that had stowed away on ships bound for the New World. Poor rotation and dung fertilizer management, along with overgrazing and ever-intensified plowing practices exhausted and eroded the soil while inducing greater runoff along waterways. The new American farming landscape, extraordinarily different from that of the Indian, was treated as a resource to be mined until exhausted beyond recovery and then abandoned.

            In the preface, Cronon begins by stating that he attempted to write the book as an “ecological history of colonial New England (xv).” To exhibit this history, the realm of interactions between the populations of New England, Native Americans, colonists, flora and fauna, must be discussed. Using ecological and historical observational sources, Cronon describes these relationships, noting that the pre-colonial ecosystem was a result of a cumulative series of ecological processes and historical events. He then explains the ways different groups and their respective generations interacted with the environment. These contrasts were not only due to a population’s productive value of nature, but also to their conflicting views of land and property ownership. Native Americans implemented mobility, utilizing the seasonal diversity of the land, while colonists were sedentary, firmly invested in the civilized superiority of permanently bounded land. Cronon illustrates the effects of these tenets upon nature and closes with the ecological ramifications in the compelled sedentism of Native Americans. Throughout the book explicit relations between animal and plant species and man are shown, such as the disappearance of the beaver, deforestation and fertilization methods, and the import of European weeds. The legacy inherited by the colonial system of seizing the plenty and wasting the undesirable will haunt humanity for generations. Much of the information and history presented by Cronon appears relevant to recent class discussion pertaining to the American consumption of out-of-season fruits and vegetables, the non-sustainability of which is ghastly. One can clearly see that the relationships between man and nature, man and man, and nature and nature are elaborately intertwined, ever influencing one another.