BB's B[GI]log

Playing catchup in CRL this week, plus trying to stay on top of blog posts. Decided to change my resident expert project for Marketing at the last minute to carbon neutrality as a marketing tactic, to align with Beat Blog and professional work. The idea is that it should be easier... in reality it might actually take me longer because I'll be invested and more interested, but at least what I learn will be useful and relevant to me.

Emailed Taj tonight about using this blog as a medium for my CRL portfolio... we'll see what she says. I think it would be a great experiment in how to use the learning journal blog concept across various classes and types of assignments.


Looking forward to the quarter wrapping up. Started my final to-do list and named the file "pass the quarter.doc". Heh. It's been a (mostly) awesome quarter content-wise, but a break will be welcome and a fresh start in January won't hurt either.

This is me, digging out from my pile of assignments and overwhelm.

I think I've identified why this quarter has presented such a big challenge for me in striking a balance between personal, professional, and academic... Now that's not to say that I've found a solution, but I've at least identified (one of) the root(s) of the problem... I'm actually engaged in my professional work. What a concept!

Last year, I wasn't engaged at all in my work. I had time to check BGI email from work (shh!), I left work on time, and when I got home, I was psyched to get into something more engaging for the whole evening, namely schoolwork. That left just balancing the academic and the personal, which seemed fairly straightforward, all things considered.

This year, I'm often working until 6 or later (because I love it), and I'm fully engaged and focused when I'm there, so by the time I get home, I'm pretty spent. I want/need some time to rest and veg out, and then I'm just as inclined to check my work email as my school/personal email, which of course has over 50 messages from throughout the day, since I have no time to check it at work. So once I've eaten dinner and read through all the emails, it's generally getting fairly late already, and it's hard to dive into assignments then.

Ok, enough whining. Sorry. I love my job and I shouldn't complain. I just need to have the mental fortitude to get through the next 2 weeks, get all of my assignments done, and pass the quarter.


And as Miriam said oh-so-eloquently,

My main goal: never let my teammates down.

Indeed.

The New Scientist's discussion of conservation psychology is quite interesting.

They say to use social pressure and people's instinct to follow the herd:

Tell people about the steps their peers are taking to make things better, and they may follow suit.

Well, then we hear people on the other side of the coin who keep talking about how individual steps aren't enough. Just today, in fact, Alex Steffen of WorldChanging posted what's bound to turn into a well-discussed rant:

Almost all of us believe that someone who buys local food, who drives a hybrid, who lives in a well-insulated house, who wears organic clothing and who religiously recycles and composts and avoids unnecessary purchases is living sustainably.

They are not. [...]

We can no longer afford to mistake the symbolic for the effective, or put our hopes in the mystical idea that if enough of us embrace small steps, our values will ripple mysteriously out through the culture and utterly transform it.

The full piece is definitely worth a read.

But when compared to the New Scientist piece, these two perspectives seem to be at odds. So my question is this: how do we balance not scaring people off with doom and gloom against spurring big, real, meaningful, non-incremental change?