Yesterday, I took my stand against personal responsibility. Yes, against personal responsibility. I’ve certainly never had to overcome any shyness about making bold statements when I had reason to make them. Over a year ago, I wrote about vicious and virtuous cycles, including their role in my own life. I wrote about getting a new job, and a new apartment.

The move away from the start-up culture afforded me more time away from work, though not at first. I worked fewer hours, but the location required a long commute through heavy traffic. I came home exhausted, and because I no longer walked to work, my health suffered further. I remained trapped there until my lease finally ran out. Once that happened, I returned to suburbia.

Ah, suburbia. What can I say about it that James Howard Kunstler, who titled his book on it, The Geography of Nowhere, hasn’t already said better (even if only for his willingness to drop a few f-bombs to emphasize the point)? Yes, it had all that and more. Giuli in particular found it stifling. We had previously lived in Squirrel Hill, one of Pittsburgh’s coolest, hippest neighborhoods. Someone once told me that the 15217 zip code has more people with doctorate degrees than any other in the country. I believe it. With both Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh in adjacent Oakland, and its large Jewish community with a disproportionate number of doctor offices, it would certainly make sense.

In a lot of ways, you could call it a step in the wrong direction. I can’t walk to work; I live close enough now, but no walking spaces exist, and I can find no safe way to cut across the major thoroughfares that girdle my office. You really need a car to get much of anywhere. Unless you have a few hours to spare, you wouldn’t even get much of anywhere even if you could find a safe place to walk, simply for the distance. But I can walk the Montour Trail regularly. I wake up each morning to the sound of birds singing outside my window, rather than large trucks.

I’ve moved again, after just one year. You expect rent increases when you live in an apartment, but this year hadn’t gone well for them, or for us. We couldn’t afford the increased rent, so we moved down the street to a new apartment with lower rent. We spent Friday moving in, and yesterday the fellow came to connect our internet, but already, we’ve noticed a difference. The fellow who lives downstairs has some less-than-hygienic habits that have already gotten on our nerves, but more than that, this place offers a few changes that I expect to make all the difference.

At our previous apartment, they could assume that cable television played such a basic part in the lives of tenants that they bundled it into the rent. Getting rid of it seemed silly, since we’d pay for it even if we didn’t get it. But I kept hearing accounts of people who’d cut the cable, and the positive impact it had on their lives. I think I could call it an addiction; I know when it went out, I felt terribly deprived. On a trip or camping I would hardly miss it, but at home, with no cable, I felt terribly agitated.

Worse, I knew I had to go to bed earlier, and I tried on several occasions. But going to bed at 11:00 PM, before seeing The Daily Show and The Colbert Report never failed to leave me feeling as if I just got up, went to work, came home, and went to sleep, with no time for myself. I couldn’t stand that feeling, so those attempts to adjust my schedule never lasted very long.

Here, the cable does not get included in the rent. So, I didn’t have it connected. We have a television still, connected to a DVD/VCR, and two old game consoles, but having no cable piped in has already had an impact. Those accounts I read and heard before all insisted that after the first few days or weeks, they didn’t miss it. I hope that bears out; as of day 3, I miss it terribly!

I’ve given myself a few days to adjust, but soon will come the next step: adjusting my sleeping schedule to get up earlier, so that I’ll have time to exercise as soon as I wake. I have an exercise bike, some free weights, and a t’ai chi DVD I’ve never really used. I’ll put them all to good use in a morning routine.

I’ve gotten Giuli interested in Calabrian cuisine, too. As Michael Pollan discusses in, amongst other books, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, taste and tradition contain wisdom that scientific nutritionists have yet to fully grasp. I think a major part of that, actually, comes back around to a common theme here. In our studies, we treat food as objects. After all, “beef is beef,” and it has innate characteristics, like its nutritional content. It can “be bad for you,” or it can “be good for you.” You’ve no doubt seen endless studies about the harmful health effects of red meat. In the case of beef, those studies all use beef from corn-fed, industrially-raised cows. After all, “beef is beef,” so what does it matter how the cow lived? In fact, those studies that do take those differences into account find that grass-fed beef and grass-fed chicken have more in common with each other than either has in common with their corn-fed counterparts. Then you have foods that can have great nutritional benefits, but only (or especially) when served together, or things like the so-called “French paradox.” All this points to nutrition arising not from the innate characteristics of discrete foods-as-objects that you can easily push into distinct “good for you” or “bad for you” categories, but nutrition, like so much else, as a matter of relationships. As Pollan points out, culinary traditions have emphasized those relationships for a very long time. Scientific nutritionists often reject those traditions in much the same way that Enlightenment-era scientists rejected the accumulated wisdom of folk traditions, believing that their scientific assessment could prescribe an optimum combination of discrete foods for health. Like so much else of the scientific project that began from those assumptions, it hasn’t worked out quite as expected.

Giuli’s father came from a small mountain village in Calabria, in southern Italy. My ancestors have lived on Turtle Island for generations, and with a few notable exceptions, left their food traditions with them in the Old World. So, Giuli has the clearest and closest connection to a living culinary tradition. Calabrian cooking uses more spices than most Italian cuisine. I noticed a lot of similarities between Calabria and our own nearby West Virginia, actually. The state’s motto (in Latin), Montani semper liberi (“Mountaineers are Always Free”) could just as easily apply to the Calabrians, who looked to their mountains for refuge from many successive invaders. Just as West Virginia’s mountain refuges defined it as a haven of freedom in the days of slavery, Calabria’s history also involved many slaves looking to the mountains for freedom and safety—including Spartacus. Both have provided homes to people rich in the land they inhabit, but poor in worldly terms, and that poverty has defined much of the culture in both places by requiring a strong community spirit and more than a little resourcefulness. It shows up in Calabrian cuisine, too, in the foods it uses, and in the sparing use of meat. It feels strangely at home here in the foothills of Appalachia, so far from the Mediterranean.

We have enough outdoor space here to grow a garden, as Giuli discussed before. It rains right now. As I type this, I listen to the drops falling. Our strawberry plant has died, but the Roma tomatoes get bigger each day. I look forward to some homemade Calabrian cuisine with homemade tomato sauce, made from our own tomatoes and seasoned with our own herbs.

This new place has greeted us warmly. On our first day here, Giuli went for a walk around the perimeter; a deer, two rabbits, a groundhog, a blue jay, and countless sparrow and robins all appeared to her, as if welcoming her. When we went out, even in the middle of the day, the groundhog tromped about. We watched the bees happily discovering our garden.

Yesterday, I talked about my weight in terms of vicious cycles and the uselessness of “personal responsibility.” I claimed that “shirking” that “personal responsibility” did not mean losing our agency—in fact, that rejecting the very premises on which the notion of “personal responsibility” rests seems almost like a prerequisite before we can claim the kind of radical agency and participation in the world that native people claim. I said, “we can do what we can to change our circumstances, bit by bit,” but I said little of what kinds of changes that would involve—much less what kind of changes I would make to address my own problem. If I took “personal responsibility” for my problems, I’d focus on changing myself, rather than “blaming” my problems on things like the context of my life. Instead, I look at my problems in their full context, and understand them as failures of context. I live in a context that encourages unhealthy behaviors. That shifts the discussion from one about my weakness, to one of how to change my circumstances. By paying attention to those things, I could make a few small adjustments—find a new job, move to a new apartment—that put me in a better context. Yes, those changes took time, but because I had them in mind, I remained aware of them when the opportunity to do something about them finally appeared.

Forty-eight hours ago, I still had boxes to haul into my new apartment. It will take time to see if these changes will have the impact I hope. Even so, I feel hopeful—more hopeful than I’ve felt in a long time.