#its been 366 days of NO CLIMATE CONTROL

[roylustang]

In my preparation to live a life more outdoors I have not used AC or heat in my house for the past year. It wasn’t really an experiment, but here’s what happened:

The temperature range outside for the past year (including wind chills and heat indexes) was approximately 26F during the predawn hours in winter to 110F at the height of the day in summer. The temperature in my house probably ranged from about 40F to 90F, but I had no way to actually measure this so it’s just an educated guess.

Obviously we’re skipping over spring and fall, because you don’t need climate control for those seasons anyway. 

Let’s start with winter, since we’re heading that direction again. For me, the main challenge of winter is honestly braving the cold for 30 seconds when I need to put on a bra to go running. That’s really it. I usually don’t wear one to work because I’m usually wearing three layers of clothing, so I don’t need one, but if I go to the town gym I have to change (the gym does not have climate control either). I don’t really have a solution for this other than to just suck it up, or wear a bra to sleep (which I used to do all the time in high school, but I dislike it now).

In order to stay warm in the winter, I have three main methods: kotatsu, blankets, and hot shower. I’m almost always wearing 2-3 layers of clothing and fingerless gloves, which I usually sleep in too. I usually do laundry biweekly in winter, and weekly (or more) in the summer. So that’s a point for winter (also no bugs). Anyway. 

Kotatsu is pretty obvious--it’s warm under there. I know my housemates have already broken their’s out for the season, but honestly I’m gonna try to not use mine this year as an added challenge, I guess? Idk, I’m also just lazy and don’t feel like getting it out. And also because...

Blankets get the job done pretty well. This apartment came with 5 million blankets. I’m currently using 3/4 of the Main Blankets on my bed, but the third one is still too hot sometimes at night. Otherwise, as long as I put my hood up I’m never cold at night or when I’m sitting in bed, which is usually what I’m doing at home.

Hot shower is the third method. I love this one because it literally gives you cold immunity for like up to an hour afterwards, especially if its Too Hot. I once got out of a Too Hot bath and ended up sitting in my underwear in my 40F room for awhile after because I was Too Hot. 

The secret fourth method is exercise, which I do a lot of because it is my Lifestyle. You have to change quick though bc your sweat will get cold fast. (then I take a hot shower, and I’m basically cold immune until its time to go to bed again lol)

Summer is a lot worse in my opinion, mainly because it’s humid. It’s literally sweat central and because this is rural Japan, I can’t exercise shirtless outside. It definitely makes me want to go outside though, because sweating is much better when youre moving than when you’re just sitting somewhere. 

I don’t really have multiple methods of cooling off except for cool showers (of which I took many), occasionally putting an ice pack on my torso when I felt like it, and using a fan (which is extremely necessary in order to not sweat, and also dry my body off when I come back from exercising. I will literally sweat through an entire shirt in 10 mins, the humidity is fucking insane, I have wrung 100ml of sweat from my short shorts, I have disinfected the home gym mats after using them for those aforementioned 10 mins. The chewing gum in my kitchen was ruined simply bc it was humid. I had to clean mold off the kitchen floors and tables. Just imagine constantly being soaking wet if you’re not in front of a flowing air source, that is my life. Luckily I derive a very masochistic joy from this, so it could be worse). I keep the windows open literally 24/7, and the fan runs whenever I’m in the house basically, unless it’s raining because it’s significantly cooler then. I essentially do not wear clothes in my house in the summer. 

The worst and completely unanticipated consequence of this though was the appetite loss. I lost approximately 10 lbs on accident, because I wasn’t eating lunch (mainly bc I wasn’t in school and I just didn’t feel hungry). This really fucked with my health and made me much more prone to passing out, especially during exercise. I was also iron deficient, though I don’t actually know what the cause was, because I was tested for that at the beginning of June. My hair was definitely falling out though. Anyway, when fall came around, I gained it all back. It’s wild to notice how my appetite changes from season to season. Now that its getting colder again, my dinners are much bigger than they used to be. 

Overall, I’m gonna keep doing this, because i’m very used to it now. I just have to make myself eat lunch when summer comes around again. Cold spaghetti never tasted so good let me tell you. Also, my electricity bill is like half of what my housemates are, so thats fun.

[uprootedandroaming]

August 25: Pondering the Mechanism on the Oregon Coast

I write to you tonight from an America’s Best Value Inn in nice little Eugene, Oregon. This was not the original plan, or even the secondary plan, or even a plan that was even remotely close to the being on the radar this morning. Had the day progressed as expected, I’d be in a tent somewhere in idyllic Newport or Yachats or Manzanita, freezing, yes, but listening to the surf pound against jagged black rocks. Poor planning, however, has holed me up in a cheap motel in this central Oregon college town, a town known for little more than being the place where that one college football team wears ridiculously tacky uniform combinations.  

After last night’s semi-debacle in Portland, the details of which I’d rather not discuss, but which ended with us staying in dilapidated old RV along the side of the highway, we set out this morning in oddly high spirits. We were, after all, planning on heading southward on the 101, down the Oregon Coastline, supposedly one of the most scenic regions in all the lower 48. After dropping my breakfast of leftovers on the spider web-lined floor of the RV, we bought some caribou jerky from a nearby gas station and set out on the 51-minute journey to the Pacific Ocean.

We started at Lewis and Clark’s final stop, Seaside, a town that has since turned into a touristy little villa complete with bumper cars, an indoor putt-putt course, and a rather curious looking place called FUNLAND. We ate some fine lobster bisque at Sam’s Cafe and decided to split. It was chilly -- only in the upper ‘50s -- and as I sheltered myself from the cold I noticed a coffee shop around the corner was hiring. I seriously-yet-fleetingly considered the idea of moving here and applying. Why not? Make some cappuccinos, take in the surf, live the life of a beach rat. I reconsidered, though, and hopped into the car. There is nothing for me out here...Lewis and Clark ended their journey in the spot for good reason: not because of the ocean, but because of too many corn dog-eating tourists.

Our next stop, Cannon Beach, was more traditional and rustic. Cannon Beach, with all its black wood buildings and quaint little shops, is what people who’ve never been to an Oregon Coastal town (see: me) expect an Oregon Coastal town to look like. It’s quiet and cozy and backdropped by an blissful water painting of lush greens and dramatic rocky cliffs. The beach itself is breathtaking. Anchored by the world-famous Haystack Rock, the sand stretches as far as the eye can see in both directions and is parenthesized in by two lush hills that jut warmly into the water. A perfect scene, minus the New England-esque weather. The sand was warm, but not so much the air and water. Caitlin put a toe in the Pacific Ocean for the first time in her life and it was more frigid than a soaked hound in a freezer.

In fact, that’s truly the only drawback of Oregon’s elegant coastline: because of the wicked weather, you can only truly enjoy it for several months of the year. After all, if it’s too cold to lay out in late August, then what time of year can you have a true beach experience? Oregon’s coast matches California’s,  blow-for-blow, in terms of inspired scenery and divine artistic resonance. What it simply can’t promise, under no fault of its own, is the flawless weather to accompany that scenery. And that’s a shame.

But what can you do? No place is perfect. Florida has outstanding beaches, but the air is a moist cotton blanket. Plus alligators and mosquitoes. Colorado’s peaks are some of the best in the world, but it’s 40-degrees in mid-August. Who wants to bundle up in summer? Seattle would be perhaps America’s most well-rounded city, except it rains 366 days per year. California, generally speaking, is as close as to perfect as it gets in terms of climate, but you have to deal with the crowds, plus the cost of living is out somewhere around Jupiter. 

It’s this endless, neurotically-constructed list of pros and cons of each city that makes picking a place to live so hair-pullingly difficult. How do you decide? I don’t know, I don’t know...if you come up with an answer, please pass along a tip or two. Meanwhile, I’ll be on the road, figuring out where the hell I want to plant my roots within the next month-and-a-half….

Down around Yachats, our appreciation for Oregon’s Coast took a backseat to finding a place to sleep. I had foolishly expected that locating a dispersed campsite in Siuslaw National Forest would be an easy ordeal. After all, National Forests allow you to camp anywhere within their perimeters. Except for a few stipulations, you can more or less set up camp on anything that’s green. The issue we ran into was finding a green spot not located on a serious cliff side. Flatness simply did not exist. And as the clock ticked, five-to-six-to-seven, and the sun continued its slow-dive into the Pacific Ocean, and all the official campgrounds filled up because it was Friday, it became clear that our options were dwindling dramatically with each town we drove past.

After much deliberation in a Shell parking lot in Florence that lasted until 9:30, we decided on the most logical course of action: we booked a 68-dollar budget motel in Eugene and ordered $12.98 worth of food from Taco Bell. Then we drove through Siuslaw National Forest, past those steep green cliffs that defied all attempts at camping, eating cheap chalupas and listening to a particularly intriguing episode of Radiolab. I’ll try to describe the gist of the episode as succinctly as possible. Here goes:

Basically, this guy -- we’ll call him Kevin -- has epilepsy. Kevin has a surgery to remove the portion of his brain causing said epilepsy. Afterward, his epilepsy is mostly cured, but certain parts of his personality become oddly exaggerated. His appetite goes through the roof. He becomes obsessed with practicing a single piece of music (he’s a musician), over-and-over again, for up to eight hours at a time. Most importantly, his sex drive flies off the charts, so much so that he begins downloading an insane amount of porn. Some of that porn, unfortunately, is of the underage variety. Kevin is eventually busted by the Feds and sentenced to two years in prison. 

Science, however, seems to prove that he was not himself after the surgery -- after all, as soon as he’s put on a certain type of medication, he basically returned to his pre-surgery self. There is no evidence that Kevin was downloading child porn before his fateful surgery.

The question raised by this peculiar series of event is this: are we really in control of ourselves? Are any of us really at fault for anything we do, or are all our decisions merely manifestations of our biological make-up? Boiled down, it’s a question of free will. Can we make truly free choices, or are we at the mercy of our own internal hard-wiring? It’s a tough egg to crack, to be sure, and I don’t have all the answers. A man who gets his rocks off to child porn has traditionally been considered a public leper. But what about a man who has a golf-ball sized part of his brain cut out of his skull? Then what?

There are no easy answers, and I don’t know where all of this is leading: this essay, Kevin’s future, our lives, the universe. It all seems like a crapshoot, to be honest. We are gifted a certain hardware, deformed as it is, but we were also given the ability to become aware of its deformities, and to some degree, correct those deformities.

Still, I make the same old mistakes. I try to learn, but arrogance -- perhaps biology, too -- intervenes and retards. I knew we’d find a campsite tonight. It was a sure thing. I’ve known in the past that we’d find a campsite, then we didn’t.

What have I learned? Now I’m sitting in a American’s Best Value Inn, in cozy Eugene, drinking a beer and writing about free will at one o’clock in the morning. I know I don’t function well without sleep. Yet I’m up late again. What, if anything, have I learned?

We’re all roaming around in FUNLAND, looking in darkened corners, grasping at straws that don’t exist, and drawing of the day we can one day move to the beach. Tomorrow I will do better.

Tomorrow I will. 

[mikemortgage]

Greek bailout ends, but Europe’s debt problem goes on

FRANKFURT — Greece officially emerges from its bailout program on Monday, after eight years of cutbacks enforced in return for massive loans and an economic collapse on the scale of the Great Depression.

The exit is a welcome milestone. But it offers little assurance that the 19-country euro currency union has left behind its problems with debt. The huge debt pile in Greece and an even bigger one in Italy will remain a lurking financial threat to Europe that could take a generation to defuse.

Europe’s debt problems have repeatedly raised fears over the past decade of a break-up in the euro, a worst-case scenario that would cause severe economic damage in the region and shake world financial markets and trade.

In Greece, successive governments had borrowed heavily for three decades to fund generous spending on jobs given to political supporters, while tolerating widespread tax evasion and covering up budget shortfalls. All that blew up mightily in October 2009, when Greece admitted its budget deficit was much bigger than previously reported. Shocked investors no longer would risk loaning Greece money at affordable rates, forcing the government to turn to rescue loans from the other eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund.

The loans came with tough conditions: closing deficits, which led to aggressive tax increases and spending cuts; and a raft of reforms aimed at improving tax collection and the business climate in general. The economy, hit hard by spending cuts, shrank by a quarter.

All told, Greece now owes total debt of 322 billion euros ($366 billion), or over 180 per cent of annual economic output. Of that, 256.6 billion euros is owed to eurozone creditors and 32.1 billion to the International Monetary Fund. In 2012, about 107 billion euros in debt was lopped off by inflicting losses on private bondholders.

Monday is the day the third and last bailout program expires, meaning no more money is available. Greece will remain subject to quarterly visits by technical experts to make sure it is meeting agreed targets for public finances until the last bailout loan is repaid, in 2060.

The other eurozone countries gave Greece enough cash to cover 22 months of financing needs and significantly eased its debt repayment terms. Greece needs to pass the quarterly reviews to activate that debt relief. But Greece will get no new reform requirements.

Some experts say that the best way to help Greece would be for eurozone countries to write off a part of the loans altogether. But governments have balked at that. The bailouts were unpopular, particularly in Germany, and loan forgiveness would be a tough sell for leaders such German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The IMF and prominent economists say that if part of Greece’s loans are not written off, its debt loan will eventually start to rise out of control again. Greece is meant to run exceptionally large budget surpluses before interest payments — so-called primary surpluses of 3.5 per cent of GDP through 2023, and 2.2 per cent thereafter. The IMF says very few countries historically have been able to do that.

It says countries often quickly undo cuts, as people get fed up over lost services. Spending on state health care in Greece, for instance, has been squeezed to one of the lowest levels in the eurozone, with the poorest 20 per cent of Greeks saying they spend 44 per cent of household income on out-of-pocket medical expenses and many reporting they have simply done without medical care.

George Pagoulatos, a professor at the Athens University of Economics and Business, says that in the end the country’s creditors may have to lower their expectations for how much Greece can save.

He thinks lower surpluses plus better economic growth from the pro-business reforms could be the key to make debt sustainable.

“It doesn’t mean that tax evasion has been eradicated or that governments will no longer do favours for their supporters,” Pagoulatos said. But the degree of reform should not be underestimated. The changes over eight years “have been very significant and they must have an impact on productivity.”

Italy’s slow growth since joining the euro has meant that the eurozone’s third-largest member has failed to work down the huge debt burden it carried into the currency union when it joined as a founding member in 1999. It remains at an elevated 133.4 per cent of GDP, the second highest after Greece. Officials associated with the coalition between the populist 5 Star Movement party and the anti-immigration League have made comments about leaving the euro and criticized the European Union’s rules limiting debt and deficits. That has raised fears of a new debt crisis.

Eurozone officials have set up ways to protect the currency union in a crisis. One is to have the European Central Bank offer to buy bonds of countries with excessive borrowing costs. But that requires signing up for a plan to reduce the public deficit, and that appears to be the last thing the current government would do. The most drastic alternative would be for Italy to leave the euro.

Guntram Wolff, director of the Bruegel research institute in Brussels, says Italy’s debt situation is different from Greece’s, in that most Italian bonds are in the hands of Italians. That means the governments’ debt payments stay at home to support spending and investment by Italians.

“In Italy, the debt problem is essentially an internal question,” he said.

Italy’s progess will be decided by a mix of three factors: rising interest rates, economic growth, and the political willingness to making savings in public finances over a number of years, that is, to forgo spending on things likes schools and pensions in order to pay debt. The recent political turmoil has unnerved investors, who raised the cost for Italy to borrow on bond markets.

“Whether Italy will be able to do this politically and economically, that is the 2 trillion euro question,” said Wolff, referring to the size of Italy’s public debt. He believes politicians’ determination to keep public finances in check is eroding. “So I would say the picture looks grimmer than it did six months ago.”

Ultimately Wolff thinks that the disruption from leaving the euro would be so great that the government would change course.

The losses “would be so massive, people would say, no, no let’s not do that.”

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