Women 350 – Statement on International Day of Climate Action

October 24, 2009 Port of Spain, Trinidad.   We are concerned citizens of Trinidad & Tobago and Caribbean.
We are the mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, lovers, wives, and workers.
Our countries are blessed with natural resources. Yet we are pursuing a model of development that is destroying our most important resource and our people.
Everywhere around the world today, people are joining forces to lend their voices to an important cause. We join them now.
Climate change is here. Climate change is now. In other parts of the world people on small islands are already being affected by climate change.
You don’t have to go to the south Pacific. Just take a drive down to Icacos and see for yourself the evidence of rising sea levels.
It does not have to be this way. We have the power to make a change now. We must make the change now. We cannot abandon future generations.
We appeal to our fellow citizens to take responsibility for your actions.
We call on you to understand what climate change is and how it affects you.
We call on you to adjust your lifestyle to reduce your carbon footprint.
We call on you to plant more of your own food and to eat less meat.
We call on you to demand stronger environmental legislation.
We call on you to hold our leaders accountable to all the international conventions they sign that rarely get enforced in national legislation.
We call on you to demand genuine development not this tidal wave of social and environmental destruction crashing down on our nations.
Our countries cry out and are being damaged by the scourge of crime.
But we remain silent on the crimes against the environment. These are crimes against ourselves and our children.
Our leaders give us confusing messages. Our leaders say they care about climate change and are concerned about the environment. It is a care that we have yet to see manifest in policies, in planning, in education, and action.
We want to remind elected leaders that you are there in service of the people. It is not the other way around. We appeal to you to stop dancing to the tune of technocrats and move with the rhythm of the people.
We appeal to you to embrace a genuine vision of development, one that gives us cleaner air, one that protects our ecological security, and one that encourages businesses and employment opportunities that enhance rather than destroy our resources.
Today on the International Day for Climate Action we take a stand. Today we let our voices be heard.
Let our voices be a call to action and let the action be as loud and as clear as collective as our voices.

LET ACTION BEGIN WITH A COMMITMEBNT OF ALL WORLD LEADERS TO CONTROLING AND REDUCING CARBON EMISSIONS TO THE RECOMMENDED 350 parts per million which is the safe upper limit for CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE ATMOSPHERE.
Please wear white and join us as we take public action on Climate Change at 3.50 p.m. in Queen’s Park Savannah (opposite Whitehall).

Women 350 – Climate Action in Trinidad!

We are a collective of women of Trinidad and Tobago.
We are gathering to add our voices to the international call.
Trinidad and Tobago is a wealthy small island developing nation rich in oil and natural gas. But we are also seeing the damaging effects of aggressive industrialisation on our islands.
This is an opportunity for women’s voices to be heard.
Our event centres around a smoke ceremony from the most forgotten voice of indigenous women of Trinidad and Tobago.
We are asking all women to come to the Queen’s Park Savannah wearing white. We are asking men to come and lend their voices in support at 3.50 p.m.
We will make the 350 with our bodies, in this way, we all take responsibility for making 350 a reality.
We all have a part to play and Saturday is a call to arms for women from all communities to begin to be conscious of climate change and how it will affect the lives of all islanders.

It’s my write.

I’m not sure if I’m accustomed to it yet.  Not having a column to say what’s on my mind.

I gave up my column not for a lack of things to say, but because I put so much of myself into those 800 words every week that there was little else left for any other kinds of writing that I’ve wanted to do since forever.

The future is not as certain as I would like. Now that my flakiness is wearing thin and I realize that, oh shit, I haven’t a parrot on a stick…But the words, the words are there, still in my head.  Trying to find ways to come out.

A dear friend from India read my palm the other day and said I am due for some drastic change of direction in my life.  I’m looking forward to change, hoping that these movements take me closer to the clarity that all the words, all the words I have written in the past ten years have been reaching for.  I still feel that it (whatever it is) is just outside my grasp. I still feel that it is just beyond the next corner.

I guess I have no choice but to keep writing. Keep reaching.  Keep hoping that I get there.

The stench of ‘progress’

As if the stink of the uselessness of the building weren’t enough. As if there weren’t enough bacchanal surrounding this monument, that my dear Mr Uncle Minsh calls the copulating slugs, here comes talk that toxic fumes from the Performing Arts Academy are making people in the neighbouring buildings fall sick. Yes, this is progress at its best.

Students from Bishop’s going home with headaches, parents feeling ill from the fumes from a few minutes’ exposure when coming to pick up their daugh-ters. Lost days of school, in a country where education is allegedly so vital. Surrounding offices had to be evacuated in a country whose watch words are discipline and production. And no one knows what the problem is. Or perhaps they know and just don’t want to say. Work continues, the show must go on. One wonders what health and safety standards apply at this site and also, if people in surrounding offices know what’s affecting them. One wonders if when they say they have a situation under control that they really do. One wonders if slipshod health and safety standards are manifesting themselves at other work sites around the country.

I hear stage whispers about overflowing toilets and uncollected garbage. And you want to give everyone the benefit of the doubt but it’s hard to when it stinks anyway. When it’s suspicious and over-expensive. When it reeks of corruption and other nastiness. You wonder what ends they will go to achieve their vision. If they will compromise the health of their own children to bring their vision to fruition. One wonders if Papa Patos must think he is some kind of pharaoh mas and needs foreign slave labour to build monuments to his greatness. At least pyramids are metaphysical wonders. One wonders what is the point of a Performing Arts Academy for which no artists were consulted. And now it makes a big stink. And no one can stop the work. No one can stop the bacchanal. Like no one can stop the stink of the La Basse from permeating their pretty Hyatt walls. Like no one can stop the traffic jams and the killing and the flooding and the recession and the spending and the spending and the spending. No one knows where the off switch is for the natural gas. No one knows how to stop work at a construction site that is making children sick. Teenage girls. Future leaders, future parents. No one knows if these toxic fumes have permanent side-effects.

No one knows what the problem is but there’s no time to stop and investigate. There’s no stopping the bacchanal. Workers like ants in a Machel video. The stench in the midday heat, mingling with the stench of the fresh pitch being laid on Abercromby Street is unbearable noxiousness. As noxious as soca is uninspiring. Not a face mask in sight on the workers, like ants, scaling the sides of the copulating slugs. Town smells. In the heat like you’ve fallen head first into a vat of rotten oil. After the rain it smells like all Chacon Street early in the morning. No one knows what standards are. No one knows what will happen when they defy the court order and build their smelter. No one knows why Phillip Julien steps on the stage and announces that smelters don’t cause cancer, although the Medical Monitoring report recommended cancer testing every six months for Alutrint workers and every year for the thousands of residents who live within a two-kilometre radius of the plant. No one knows who is actor and who is audience. No one knows who is telling the truth or if they are reciting their lines. And not just whether they are capable of telling the truth but if they care enough to do so.

One wonders who they are planning for in the future if they don’t mind putting us at risk now. Any risk is too much. Any fume is too much. Any danger is unnecessary. Especially for a building that is probably going to be little more than a monument to Papa Patos’ penchant for big shiny buildings. The future of the nation. Those who will have to reap the 2020 whirlwind. I am begging for their forgiveness in advance. Like they never hear about make sure better than cocksure. Like they never hear about erring on the side of caution. The stink permeates the town. Blending in with all the other pollution. We act our daily roles. Trying not to notice the stench. It is a tragic kind of comedy, really. Shakespeare couldn’t have written it better and not even my dear Mr Uncle Minsh could have dreamt up such a bizarre tableau for the now dead Savannah stage. One wonders if this is a city or a cesspool. One wonders when or where the play will end and the horrific reality begin.

A whole lot of daggering

You know things are bad when it’s budget day and nobody in your taxi particularly cares to hear the speech.
It is no longer just good old Trini inertia.  The mere sound of the droning speech elicits a chorus of steups, long watery ones, too boot.

Your taxi driver is bored. The people in the taxi are nodding. It is Petit Carème heat in climate-change times. Sweat is everywhere. Your taxi driver switches off the drone. Switches to Busy Signal. Up in ar belly belly belly belly. The music is an assault. But you’d rather take the daggering from the dancehall than the daggering from the Government. The violence with which every decision stabs at your core. Sounds like noise in your ears. You try your best to understand what the hell they are saying. It is offensive. It is antiquated masculinity. It is a government gone man. Take your stabbing like a woman. Take your stabbing like you like it.  You can’t ask the Government for a refund if you think they’re doing crap with your money. You can’t ask to see their supporting documents, you can’t ask what possesses them to fund this and not that.

Up in your belly belly belly belly. Every point is a stab to your core. Leaving you weak and too tired to protest or even cry out in anguish. So what’s the point of the budget? What purpose does it serve when I have no say in one red cent of that money? What’s the point if it’s tagged to a future vision that is at the very least ill-thought and at the worst blind?
Busy Signal comes out ahead of Karen Tesheira. At least the music is seductive. At least there is some minor pleasure to be derived. Even if it disguises the ugliest sentiments. Even if it is a dirty, filthy object of mass media brainwashing.  You can have some emotional detachment to it. In another stewing traffic jam, in another endless waiting at the side of the road for the river that has come rushing down your city’s main street to subside so that you can get to the other side. At least Busy Signal is trying to entertain. The budget is like the Abu Ghraib of speechifica-tion.

What is the point of this pretense? You can see this dancehall vileness in a context. There is no context for the budget daggering. There is no sense in the inane table-banging by Red House yes men and women. There is nothing even remotely sexy about their wining on your future. Busy Signal is addling your brain. Busy Signal is making you crazy. You keep asking the driver to change the track. He doesn’t understand why you are so uptight. I mean everybody likes a lil daggering every now and then. Public or private is immaterial. You feel exposed. He turns on the radio again. It’s the budget again. And the dirty feeling remains. The assault on the ears never ends. It changes cadence and accent but there is that same familiar note of contempt in the delivery. The same disdain for your life, for your humanity. The same underlying threat that you better like it, or else.

Up in your belly belly belly belly. You want to run screaming from the two horrors. You want to turn off all the ugly voices, all the unnecessary platitudes about love and commitment spliced in between violence and fluff.
But you take it. You don’t want to be impolite. Again. You don’t want to get out and walk in this heat. Everything is just too much. Up in your belly belly belly belly. Everything is overdone. Everything is wibble wabbling nonsense. The music reflects the crass stupidity of the politicians and their daggering ways. The musician knows that this is madness. The people in the Red House would like you to believe that they believe that they are making sense. Who gives a damn. They do it because they think they have to. We endure it because we have no choice. Up in our collective belly belly belly belly. So take some more daggering. This is your lot in life. This is your destiny. This passa passa politics is all that we need. Up in your belly belly belly belly. Nothing but empty words. Bend over Trinidad and take your essential government dagger. Bend over Trinidad and take your standard issue stabbing from the roughest winer. Pon de edge pon de edge pon de edge of disaster.

No Justice for Angels

The strong get more


While the weak ones fade


Empty pockets don’t


Ever make the grade


Mama may have


Papa may have


But God bless the child


That’s got his own


That’s got his own.

—God Bless the Child, Billie Holiday

Somebody’s child. Born out of love. Carried for nine months. Dead on the front page. Too obscene to forget. Too callous to comprehend. Somebody’s child. Reminding us that some of us are editors and can choose to put other people’s dead children on the front pages of their putrid tabloid newspaper, and some of us are mothers who weep for our dead children and some of us consumers who allow newspapers to feed our blood lust. Turn your face away. It is too much to bear. Too much to fathom that your life and your child’s life could end up being on the front page of someone’s putrid little tabloid. A day’s worth of newspaper sales. Your child’s life, all her smiles, and her discoveries, every flutter she made in your belly, every moment you marvelled at the wonder of human creation.  Something that you made. Out of love. Reduced to a headline and a front page.

Turn your face away. Wish it could be for good. It’s not the first time. They’ve done this obscene, crass and indecent injustice to somebody’s loved one. You know if it were their child, they would want to mourn in private. They would not want thousands of fingers on the face of their child. Taken in such a brutal way. Will this stop people from buying their driver’s licence? Will this stop people from the road rage? What do we do when we can’t take it anymore? Boycott? Try to ignore them out of existence? So that no other family will ever have to confront their loved one laid bare on the front page of a putrid tabloid again? So that children can have dignity in life and death too? Defenceless ones can rest in peace too? Innocent ones can maintain their innocence without the stink of those who try to capi-talise on human tragedy, whose desire for profit removes them from any connection to their humanity?

Why do they think they can do this to us? Why do they think we will take it?
Maybe we like it so. Maybe we are so inured now. So cynical about life and death that a dead baby on the front page of a putrid tabloid is no scene. Number one newspaper indeed. Good news newspaper indeed. Number one may be an enviable position if it meant that you were confronting us with our ugliness as well as our beauty. Number one may be something to aspire to if it meant that truth was not in the gore of the wound but in the exploration of the wounding and the speed of trying to find the healing. Oh it is too much to bear. It is time for us to rethink what stories we tell and how we tell them. To ask who or what is truth and what right do we have to utter it?

Because every time you think there’s nowhere else below for us to go, the bottom falls out again and we descend further into our la basse of unfeeling. Every time you think it couldn’t possibly get any worse, that children couldn’t possibly be more of an abused and voiceless group, some adult is there to prove you wrong. You have to wonder if the devil is really real. If the devil busy in truth, just running about kicking Trinis in their backsides prompting them to do the most evil of acts, under the guise of truth-sharing. Who is wrong in this situation? Is it the mother for having the child in her lap out of a car seat, out of a seat belt? Is it the photographer for capturing the face of a dead child laying in the grass? The editor who thought it would make a great front page?

The child for being born in the first place? Somebody’s child, oh God. You turn away from her face. Her perfect cherub cheeks. But she stays with you. Haunting you, keeping you awake at night. There is no justice for angels who land in highway grass. There is no love for innocence in this gory time. Turn away, close your eyes. Try to forget her eyes forever closed. Like their hearts that cannot understand why this is wrong. Protect your heart from the hurt, because they think they are right and they in their putrid tabloid righteousness will do this crime again. And get away with it. Leaving us hurting, crying, grieving for innocence lost that can never be regained in the thousands of hands of their readers.

Tight belts and Guava Season

Them belly full

But we hungry

A hungry man is an angry man

Rain a fall

But de dirt it tuff

Pot a cook

But de food nuh nuff

Dem Belly Full, Bob Marley

Should we tighten our belts or loosen them? Papa Patos claims the worst is over.

And like an obedient child I desperately want to believe him. I want to believe that sooner rather than later, it will be okay again. Presuming of course that it was ever okay. Presuming of course that politicians don’t just say whatever comes to their minds, because they can, because they feel like it, because they are so high on power that they can say what the hell they want and zaffeh us if we take them too seriously.

My belt remains tight. So tight I can feel it constricting my ribs. It’s the look now anyway. Tight belts. High on the waist. . At least the government is in style.

Even the men are wearing their pants tight. Tight’s alright, Papa Patos. We can deal with it.

The belt is tight. So tight it is strangling our resolve. Tiring us out. Collapsing our internal organs.

Our breath is shallow now. Don’t take in too much oxygen now. Your brain might start to think. Your brain might start to process all the BS.

Mariano Browne says loosen it but not too much. Just enough to pick up the ever so faint stench of lies, half truths, baked facts, massaged figures, manufactured outcomes.

The tight belts shouldn’t stop the fete. The tight belts don’t create a moment for quiet reflection from our leaders. They bray on regardless. Do not bother to disguise their lack of a plan. The tight belts are a fashion statement and little else.

In their tightened belts Trinis lime on the Avenue. The drinks flow like water. Belts are not too tight to take in alcohol. To drink down the bitter sweet inertia of spirits that demand their tribute on the streets in the early mornings.

One morning close to dawn I met a young man with a jaw wired shut from his kidnappers beatings. His belt is tightened to hold him together, to keep smiling in spite of a jaw full of titanium. To go on enjoying life in Trinidad without the fear of someone spilling his insides onto the bloodthirsty asphalt.

In their tightened belts policemen kill their women. Tobagonians murder tourists and the children from up the road curse their mothers as they stone my neighbour’s mango tree.

Tight belts. Tight thoughts. Tight minds that allow us no space to consider our humanity.

But whether the belt is tight or loose it is still the guava season of no guavas. When one zaboca could cost you more than the cost of a trip to the country to pick one from your grandmother’s tree.

It’s Mr. Zaboca and Madame Starch now. The tight belt makes us believe that we are not deserving of such luxuries on small tropical islands. No no. Fruit is a luxury and coconut water is the drink of the nouveau riche to chase their Johnny and chase away their fears of losing their affluence.

Tight belts shield us from a desire to taste ourselves. Tight belts give us a thirst for difference. To not be ourselves. To hold ourselves up to someone else’s standards.

So he says we can loosen them now. And we are so happy for the ease up that we still can’t see through the thinly veiled hysterics.

We are tired from the tightened belts. Malnourished in this intellectual wasteland. Starved of leadership.

But whether the belt is tight or loose we still have leaders who give us bizarre directives. Fill our minds with pipe dreams and platitudes. Make us do a dance of fortune in a time when there is so much misfortune stalking us that we must look like a paw paw tree covered with blight.

Those who have never known a loose belt smile wearily. Those who have suffered in good times and bad, know better than to believe any hype.

They know that tight or loose is the same old khaki pants.

Splitting of Her Breasts.

One of my favourite people in the world, Uncle Ravi-ji, told me this story one day. It was raining that day two months ago. I was sitting with him after the Ganga Dhaaraa celebrations up at Marianne River in Blanchisseuse. It was one of those perfect Trinidad days, with a perfect dawn, and beautiful children and music and rain and mangoes and a river.

When Hindus came to celebrate the connection between ecology and spirituality. Because if you see the river as sacred, you wouldn’t put the goddess out of your thoughts and pollute it, right? I was telling Uncle Ravi-ji about all the potential environmental disasters this country is going to have to confront in a few years time. And how important it is for people like him and other well loved and respected spiritual leaders to come out and condemn some of the things that are going on in Trinidad. And in that way that I love about people who have a lot more sense than the politicians, he started to tell me a story. The story is about him and his grandfather.

He paints a picture and I see it clearly; him as a young boy, among the first children in his village to go to secondary school. And one day a man from Neal and Massy turns up. He comes to talk to these children of indentured labourers about purchasing tractors. The salesman’s pitch is slick. The salesman paints a picture of an easier life, of children like Ravi-ji who will be able to study in peace without having to engage in the backbreaking labour that brought their ancestors here. Of no more hungry children in their village. Of profits from sales of all their agricultural produce.
Ravi-ji’s aja (grandfather) listened at the meeting. His father was excited and so was he.

When they got home his grandfather spoke up. And here Ravi-ji quotes his grandfather in Bhojpuri and for moment the old man is there with us. Ravi-ji’s aja was against the purchase of a tractor. He said, the tractor would split open Mother Earth’s breasts. How can a wounded breast continue to sustain life? And Uncle Ravi-ji admits to me that he was angry at his aja, because all he wanted to do was go to school and have a different kind of life. The tractor represented to him all that was modern, different and progressive.

His aja was keeping him back. The villagers got their tractor in the end. And Uncle Ravi-ji went to school. His aja went the way of all flesh. But the tractor did split Mother Earth’s breasts. And now there are more tractors, but as Uncle Ravi-ji concludes his story, he observes that even today there are still starving children in that village. How did his aja know and understand the effects that industrialisation would have on the environment? Without all the book learning and the slick facts he was able to articulate a concern for nature that none of them could understand? The simplicity of that story reverberates now with me as I look around at a society that is eagerly chasing after more tractors. And those who share a concern for Mother Earth’s split breasts are sidelined and silenced. They are unwilling to pay the price of progress.

We live in a society where decorum and decency and adherence to laws are upheld as benchmarks of the good citizen, but the reverence we feel for the things that sustain us, well you could get laughed at for expressing concern. It’s not that the tractor is the only alternative now. We’ve come a long way from those days. It grieves me that it is the tractor that still represents modernity when it is our ajas and our grandmothers and our tanties whose ideas are timeless and more sustainable. I wish some people had even one millionth of Uncle Ravi-ji’s aja’s wisdom. Then they wouldn’t write bizarrely stupid headlines like “Are environmentalists anti-people?” Because they would understand that it’s not how many tractors you have or how much oil you drill or how many smelters you build. But the humanity and the humility of what you do with your knowledge and your resources.

That progress and destruction don’t have to always go together and the destruction excused as some kind of by-product. Like all those ads for drugs on cable TV whose lists of side-effects seem to far outweigh whatever benefits the drug was intended to have. That it’s not about financial profiles and projections but how the people of your country are coping under the crushing weight of your greed. How your gluttony looks to those under you who have less than nothing. How your excess feeds their resentment and how ultimately they will be made to pay for your gross and sloppy mishandling of Mother Earth’s breasts.

Well Said, Papa Patos

On truth devoured
Silent play in the shadow of power
A spectacle monopolised
The cameras eyes on choice disguised
Was it cast for the mass who burn and toil?
Or for the vultures who thirst for blood and oil?
Yes a spectacle monopolised
They hold the reins, stole your eyes
All the fistagons the bullets and bombs
Who stuff the banks?
Who staff the party ranks?

—Guerrilla Radio,Rage Against the Machine

I never thought I would say this, but maybe Papa Patos is right. It irks me to admit it too. That I could agree with anything he says is enough to give me a headache and make me want to leave the country before zaboca season starts properly. The clip came on the radio early on Tuesday morning. A screeching voice that I didn’t immediately recognise as the big daddy himself. I guess I haven’t ever heard him sound so high-strung. It sounds like Papa Patos is finally getting antsy about just how many of the party faithful still love him and would turn out whether or not he sent a bus to pick them up and provided free pan, free rum and a rent-a-crowd appearance fee. The announcer cut through the audio clip to explain that the PM had been addressing party faithful the night before at Woodford Square when he said that he didn’t think the media were playing their role properly.

It’s not the first time that he’s expressed this sentiment. Let’s not forget the whole storming the radio station and getting the announcers suspended because he is a regular citizen who has a right to complain if something bothers him. Maybe he can’t help himself. It’s a time-honoured tradition in Trinidad now for Prime Ministers to have suspicion and contempt for the media. Papa Patos is right this time though. The media aren’t playing their role properly. If they were, people like him would never be able to hold on to power for as long as he has. The default response of course is to presume that anyone who expresses a thought that is not toeing the ruling party’s line must be working for the opposition. Because of course a citizen can’t possibly think in a way that is independent without someone else planting the seed of disagreement in his or her head.

That the media are populated by citizens who are nervous about crime, nervous about falling advertising revenues that pay their salaries is neither here nor there for Papa Patos. But it should mean the world for us. Because if the media can’t truly represent the concerns of the people of this nation, then what is the point of publishing newspapers, what is the point of producing a radio or television broadcast. If the media can’t quarrel with the Government the way that most citizens can only dream of having an opportunity to do, why are we here? Papa Patos is right. I mean, if the media really were doing their work, half of the bobol and bacchanal that people get away with in this country would be properly scrutinised. Indeed, if we had the vulvicular fortitude to really do our jobs we’d have him a little more than sweaty and hysterical in Woodford Square.

Unfortunately many of the people who work in the media are as paralysed by fear as the rest of the population. Or just generally uninterested in coming out of their comfort zones, investigating, questioning or challenging the stories they report on. The critical eye is virtually non-existent, and what is left in its place is some occasional whiny criticism. We are ill-equipped to find the facts, let alone challenge anyone with them. Whether it’s on the Merhair issue or the smelter issue as reporters we are missing the point and getting caught up with the smoke instead of the fire. Information is the only weapon necessary when you are fighting for freedom, and there is information that is missing from our collective national consciousness. However if Papa Patos thinks the role of the media is to be a glorified public relations outfit designed to make the mess that they make smell like roses I hope we continue to be abysmal failures. If the role of the media is to defend a nation with the truth, then we desperately need to start sharpening our tools.

Yesterday I got bored of Facebook.

It’s been interesting watching the responses from close friends to I guess my rather sudden deactivation of my Facebook account.  People want to know if I’m ‘okay’. As if coming off Facebook is some kind of sign of possible madness, depression or some other crisis of social exclusion.

Truly, I’ve always kind of questioned my sanity but not enough to seek professional help.  I mean, who needs meds when there are mangoes and meggies, right?

Anyway, for an addict I seem to be coping really well. Haven’t broken out in sweats or anything and my primary thought all day has to my relief not revolved around creating a witty, thought-provoking status update.  I’m still on Twitter, but it’s never really consumed my life as much as the ole crackbook.

I don’t know what prompted me yesterday to deactivate, maybe it was the full moon, but much like when I stopped eating meat, it was a thought that entered my mind and once it did, I didn’t second guess it or wait for the doubt to set in.

It was a lot easier too, after a week and a half partial fast caused by the sudden and untimely demise of my hard drive.  After the initial distress, I woke up the next morning and started doing the gardening that I’d wanted to do since the beginning of the rainy season.  In the hour that I would ordinarily have spent fiddling around with my page, I managed to sort out my compost heap and chop my way through some weeds, and set up a bed of tomatoes, pigeon peas, and peppers.

I was stunned and quite frankly ashamed of myself to discover just how much time I could waste. Time that I could never regain.  Scary.

When I got my laptop back it was easy to fall back into the same old pattern. It’s easy when it’s your news feed, your grapevine, your companion, your measure of yourself, your propaganda.

But I find myself these days desperately wanting to break out of familiar patterns and my FB addiction is a rather good place to start.

I realise now that I’m writing this that FB encouraged me to write more in sound bites.  Which is not really the best thing if you’ve got a book to get out of your head and you have a woefully short attention span anyway.  Of course there was also the immense element of navel gazing, people macoing, how many times a day can you check one person’s profile-ing.  Luckily for me I get bored easily.  I guess yesterday was the day I got bored with Facebook.  It remains to be seen how long I can sustain the fast.  I now have no clue about friends birthdays, haven’t bothered to check the news and I also don’t have a clue about what is happening in Port of Spain anymore.  I guess if it’s important enough somebody will actually pick up the phone or something.  But for the most part I am enjoying not being caught up in the noise of other people’s lives.