The Parva Project

One of the things I will get around before too much time passes, is paring down my wardrobe.  I have too much stuff, and in solidarity with most people in the world today, I will be making a trip to Goodwill very soon.  But there isn’t any reason not to do it with a bit of style.  Low key style, mind you, but nonetheless.

Several years ago, I had jotted down some notes for the bare minimum wardrobe a man should have, and I also checked out a couple of websites such as The Art of Manliness which is brimming with advice.  My ideas haven’t changed much, and many of the items that I have do come from second hand stores.  Now when I say “bare minimum” that is exactly what I mean.  And I would really like feedback on this one!

Not counting outerwear, here is the bare minimum:

1. Suits.  First, for the love of St. Pete, yes if you are a man, you need a suit.  A dark suit.  I’m not here to micromanage you, but you will wear it to formal occasions such as weddings, church, and your own funeral.

2. Jackets.  You thought we were done with the formal wear, didn’t you?  Blue blazer or sports coat (or both, if you find a sale).  A camel hair jacket*.

3. Sweaters.  V-neck.  Polo.  Try to stick with natural fabrics.  Cotton and sweater-vests are verboten.  Always take a woman with you when sweater shopping and for checking the fit.

4. Shirts, long sleeved, button down.  You need three of them.  A white one, a blue one, and a striped one.

5. Shirts, polo, pick your colors.  You only need two or three.

6. White t-shirts.  Wear them under your long sleeved button down shirts.  Please.

7. Pants.  Plain khakis, blue jeans, corduroys, blue or black wool.

8. Shoes. After thinking about it, I had to come back and revise this.  Here is the bottom line:  No man should own more than five pairs of shoes, ever, for any reason.  I heard of one man who always wore brown boat shoes, even if they clashed. He owned two pair, and when his “dress shoes” started looking sad, they became his “casual shoes.”  When the soles of his casual shoes wore through, he bought a new pair, and the former dress shoes became his casual shoes.  I don’t have a single bad thing to say about this man, and we should all strive for the simplicity of his system.

9. Ties.  Tie one around your neck when you wear a suit, and shut up.  The ladies like them and you don’t have a choice unless you want to be perceived as a whiny, over-indulged b’yotch.  And I will call you out.

10. Reversible belt.  Black on one side, brown on the other.  ’Nuff sed.

11. There isn’t an eleven.  You don’t need that many clothes.

Now throw the rest in a plastic bag and take them to Goodwill.  If they give you store credit, use it to buy the things you are lacking.  Granted, this list is for a Midwestern city dweller.  Tailor it to fit your individual needs, except for the suit.  You will dress up for formal events, and you will wear a tie, pal.  And obviously I haven’t gotten into base garments, performance fabrics, or cold weather layering.  I will in an upcoming post.  For now, I’ll just say that less is more, and enough is ideal.

*Camel hair jackets rock.  Seriously rock.  You can dress them down with jeans and a polo, or dress them up to darned near formal wear.  Okay, just shy of formal wear.  They make frequent appearances at thrift stores.  Make sure the one you buy is in good condition, and get it a size or so larger than your normal size so it hangs nice.

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As seen on the Nickel Plate Trail

This past weekend was my National Guard drill, and planning Parvazation into it was a bit difficult. I haven’t watched a lick of television and that wasn’t a problem. And I will ride my bike to work one day this week. Maybe even tomorrow, depending on the weather. But brown bagging it at drill wasn’t an option, because they provide lunch (Subway) and <gulp> I didn’t prepare properly for the other meals. I got myself into a time crunch but learned a valuable lesson when I stopped at the Clown’s place and got an eggmic muffin and a large diet cola. I had been drinking water, tea, coffee and beer, and eating home cooked meals, left-overs, fresh fruit and peanut butter sandwiches for the past week.

I’ll just say that I didn’t like the way I felt after I ate the Clown food. I’m not going back to carbonated beverages, and I’m going to do my best to stay away from restaurants.  I did get a chance to burn it off with a 30 mile bike ride on the Nickel Plate Trail.

In between now and the day that I have successfully achieved human scale and pace into my life, I have a lot of crap to do. Too many tasks to focus on them one at a time, I’m thinking, but the important things have to come first. Things like cooking meals, conversations, taking care of the house and the yard. Making it an inviting place to spend time. Things like getting rid of all the stuff I have and don’t need. And finding a few minutes a day to share on the Parva Project website, of course.

One step at a time, I’m getting to where I want to be. I’m testing the water so I’ll be able to show others how to swim.

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“I finally got it all together, but I forgot where I put it.” ~Anon

You will be happy to know that I got up this morning and rode my bicycle to work. It was a perfect ride, around 55 degrees when I left, but comfortable with a hooded warm-up and bike shorts. I averaged just under 15 miles per hour, and will be making the return trip at the end of the work day. When I got here, I noticed that I had left my packed lunch at home. No worries about packing one for tomorrow.

The ride took 1400 calories out of me, though, and I confess that I grabbed breakfast at the Subway on post. Six inch sunrise flatbread with egg white and loaded with spinach, onion, and peppers. Hopefully it will keep me through the day. I have a few snacky items here, but I want to keep it as fresh and unprocessed as possible.

A side note:  We were working in the yard last night.  With daylight savings time, you can do that late spring in Indiana until about 10 p.m. The yard edging had been getting away from us since we’d been focusing on the arbor and rock garden in the front side next to the street entrance.  I had a gas powered weed whacker when we were in Virginia.  Obviously given the nature of what we are doing with the Parva Project, I don’t want a gas powered whacker.  The hand clippers I picked up a few weeks ago were find for smaller jobs, but wasn’t feasible for doing the whole yard.  What I found was a Black and Decker battery-pack powered string trimmer.  It even came with two battery packs, and it works.  What more could I ask for?

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Arrrgghhh…

I had left them in the van after last night’s ride around Columbus.  The van that my wife took to the store to restock the snack cakes at the grocery store for her cousin.  And my workplace makes us wear a helmet and gloves to ride on post.  When she got back, it was too late for me to ride the bike to work, so I took everything off of the rear rack, put my uniform on and drove the van to work.  Two out of three ain’t bad.  And I still have four more days to get a ride in.

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Blatantly stolen from BusinessInsider with a link-back for good measure!

It is a bit late for a New Year’s Resolution, so how about a June’s Here Resolution?  It would be an understatement for me to say that the Parva Project has taken up a certain residence in my brain the past several weeks.  I am anxious to implement the principles that will become associated with the project, and so I’m announcing to you now, that beginning on Monday, June 4th, I will start to implement into my life, in a radical way, what I have been talking about and thinking about for quite awhile now.  Yes, I’ve been doing some of it here and there, in a wishy-washy and sporadic way, but now it is time to get serious.  I want to prove to myself and to you that the Parva Project can make a positive difference in peoples’ lives.  And I am not talking about insignificant differences.

So here is the deal:  Starting on Monday, I will be fully implementing three major changes into my daily routine.  First (and this one is easier for me than for a lot of people, and for all intents I have been doing it for over a month already) I’m T.V. free.  For those of you who don’t know, that is sort of the sprinter’s blocks of the Parva Project; the single most important litmus test to see if you are serious or just playing games.

Second, I’m brown bagging it.  To speak of sustainable nourishment practices, the way I have been doing it is all wrong, and if you don’t mind me suggesting it, might be wrong for you, too.  It is so easy for me to jump in the car and zot down to McDonalds or Snappy Tomato Pizza for lunch.  I do really well with breakfast (normally coffee and oatmeal with cinnamon and walnuts) and dinner (at the dining room table with my family), but lunch kills the whole deal.  I just blow it.  But not anymore.  As of Monday, I’m officially done with Frankenfood and the gas-guzzling slog down the highway to retrieve it.  No more Taco Bell (snif).  No more Hardees thickburgers (waaaaahhh!).  From here on out, I’m brown bagging it, and bringing food made by people who love me, or by my own mitts.

Third has to do with my commute.  Yes, I have one of those.  I don’t like it.  But when I took this job, I thought it was okay.  Don’t get me wrong, I love my job.  I just hate that I’m burning so much gas, and wasting so much time in a boring car, driving down roads on which the jerks behind me want me to go faster than I want to go.  The whole non-sustainability factor burns me up.  So from now through the temperate months (let’s say…through October), once per week I’m not going to drive to work one day per week.  That will be my starting point, and I will expand from there.  But for now, to get started, I’m going “alt.”  At twenty miles, my commute isn’t walkable .  At least not in a one day.  And there isn’t public transportation between where I live and where I work.  So options are to bike, which I plan on doing to get this thing started, or car-pool.  Which I will look into.  I don’t know if there is anyone else who lives where I do, who works where I do, who works the same hours that I do.  But I will find out.

So there it is.  No more T.V.  for me.  I’m brown-bagging it for lunch, and I’m riding my bike to work once a week and looking for a car-pooling deal.  Wish me luck.  Join me if you have the…willpower.

And as an added bonus, I promise that by the end of the month, to cement my T.V. free commitment, I will devise a way to, shall we say, bring my boob-tube to an untimely end, and I will be the first to upload the video of my adventure (the link has been there for awhile, look under “topics,” then “Parva Principles,” then “Tubesmashing”).  I’ll put up a post when it is hung on the server.  How do you think it will end for mister Devil’s Eyeball?  Fire?  Ice?  Sledge hammer?  Bow and arrow?  12 gauge shotgun?  Email me your suggestions!

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Wild leaven returneth

When I got home from work today, I was met by a neat stack of mail on my desk and diligently began sorting and dispositioning it.  Yes, I know that I just used a five syllable word on you.  I’m sorry.  Imagine the look on my face when a self-addressed, stamped envelope with my handwriting on it came to the top of the stack.  Down in the bottom left I had written “sourdough starter.”

Sourdough starter is sustainable.  This wild yeast has been in continuous existence, leavening breads across this great land for more than 165 years.

Yes!  The journey that started over two weeks ago was now complete.  Oh the speed of the United States Postal Service, God bless ‘em.  Carl’s Friends had warned me that this transaction could take up to five weeks to complete.

As I write this, the starter is sitting in the oven, in a re-purposed Cool Whip container, rising “for up to forty-eight hours.”  At that time I will add another cup of water, another cup of flour, and some potato flakes.  Shortly after that, I will be making, and eating, my own sourdough bread.

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Permanence

Earlier today I was reading Fritz Schumacher’s essay, “End of an Era” in his book This I Believe, and Other Essays.  There is a list of three things that we need to change.

We need to adopt a different attitude toward nature.

At the risk of being caught off guard, I truly believe that we are so far down the path of treating nature as a warehouse fully and perpetually stocked to the doors with cheap resources with a short shelf life, that it will take a generation just to undo the damage of that philosophy.

We have to get rid of the idea the “bigger is better.”  

“There is a certain measure in things that is right, beyond that or below that is wrong.  The beauty of smallness may be defined as that of the human scale.  The beauty of it is that at the right scale you can introduce the TLC factor.”  I was completely floored by this statement, because I had never thought of it so succinctly.

We need to produce a new technology.

What are his criteria of what will determine whether the technology is appropriate?  Health, beauty and permanence.   I would add that, building on the second item on the list, it should be small, like us.  Health because the technology should not destroy us physically or spiritually, but should make us healthier or at a minimum be benign to us.  Beauty because of the tendency to do a thing simply because we are able.  So much of what we create is ugly.  Permanence because only that which can be sustained will remain.  We might as well begin now adopting sustainability wherever we find the need for it.

He ends with “It is absolutely necessary and indeed inevitable, if we want to survive, to bring in many more activities back into the home, where homes still exist.”  It may be that this is our biggest problem.  Nobody is home anymore.

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Indy parks story photo blatantly lifted from indystar.com, but hey, this is a link-back so thank me.

First, we see that once again Indiana comes out at the bottom of the list by data that pertains to livability.  Click on the picture for more.  We are ranked 36th out of 40 among big cities based on park and playground acreage, and spending per resident.  I love living in a state with challenges.

<snark>It isn’t like availability of green space or connectedness to nature has anything to do with human physical or psychic well being</snark>

In brighter news, it appears that there is a local  bike boom going on.  I already knew this, as I am part of it.  But it is good to see it in print (again).

Lastly, an op-ed by Jonah Goldberg of the National Review addressing capitalism.  This is of personal interest to me because earlier today, before I’d even picked up the paper, I ordered a copy of the newly released, “Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy” by Fr. Robert Sirico of Acton Institute.   Capitalism relies on the free market, but the two terms are not the same.  Goldberg in the editorial is speaking of the “social market” and talks about job creation and what sort of capitalism we want to have in this country.

Well, we are going to continue having the same problems that we’ve been having until people change their minds and change their hearts.  I’ve seen enough since 1965 to realize that we are a fallen lot.  Anything we touch gets tainted with some sort of vice.  That is a difficult job even in times when there are high moral standards.  In times like ours it is a nearly impossible job.  It isn’t so much the system that has to change, we have to change.

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The notebook

As I have had time to reflect over the past few days about the Parva Project, I have come to several conclusions.  I will share them with you here.  In a spirit of openness and transparency, I feel I owe it to my readers to live this project out in my own life, and to be honest about its under-pinnings.

The Parva Project would not have been born without the thoughts of several visionaries, first and foremost these two:  the late “magister Johannes” Dr. John Senior of University of Kansas great books program fame, and the also late Fritz Schumacher who changed the world with his book “Small is Beautiful.”

Everyone who knew Senior also knew that he was Catholic.  With Fritz, not so much.  His pre-conversion travels put him into contact with many cultures, and many of the references in SiB refer to “Buddhist” this and that.  Quite good.  He understood that there are common truths in most religions and it is right to attribute a source correctly when it drives the nail home, so to speak.  To the extent that Buddhism seeks for and in many instances has found a proper balance, that balance should be recommended.  And so there are such references by the profoundly and almost uniquely Catholic voice of Schumacher.  Did I mention that E. F. Schumacher was Catholic?  There, I said it.

He felt that labeling these truths “Catholic economics” and what not would alienate a segment of his readership.  I doubt in all honesty that I’ll ever have the readership he has had.  I’ve not his brain nor his education.  He was brilliant; I’m a mope standing on giant’s shoulders.  We also live in different times than he did.  The Internet was a generation away.  Websites and blogs were still ideas jotted on napkins.  My audience can be selective of whether they want to associate with the likes of me; because those who discover the Parva Project and decide it is for them can act on its principles, implement it in their lives, and change their corner of the world.  Or they can go away.  Or they can come back.  And leave diatribes in the combox.  And I’ll answer them.  Modern communication really is dynamic that way.

So here is the bottom line.  I’m not going to hide, or put into shadow, the fact that I am Catholic, that my motives are Catholic, or the fact that in all cases what I’m proposing isn’t something my fevered, ADHD riddled brain concocted.  It is simple Catholic Social Doctrine.  Don’t let that scare you away, because if I had chosen to hide the fact that this was Catholic Social Doctrine I would have told you that it was simple Common Sense, which in today’s world might be considered Uncommon Sense.

That doesn’t mean I’ll be preaching at you.  To the extent that I am Catholic, and that I’m a layman patching together an action plan on how to live sanely and sustainably according to a human scale and pace, I will state so openly and without apology.  If religion turns you off, you might just pick over the black jelly beans, if you will, and take away what you want.  If you just plain hate Catholics, you might want to go away.

Being “green” isn’t something thought up by a tan New Agey skeletor woman wearing crystals and living in a Yurt in Yuma.  Green is the liturgical color for Catholic ordinary time for a reason.  Green should be deeply ingrained into the ordinary fabric of our daily lives.

But getting back to the point that I buried so long ago that I can’t even find where I dropped the thread now, there are many people from many different philosophical places being called to walk this path.  You may be one of them.  I will not question your motives, but will do my best to help you implement sustainability and human scale and pace into your life.

I also realized when I started the Parva Project website that I would be doing so in a scrappy and piecemeal way.  You can tell that this isn’t a “refined” product with a team of financiers pacing with their cell phones waiting for me to call.  I want you to be part of the process.  I wanted you to roll up your sleeves with me, participate in building it, and watch it all come together.

This is how I wish to spend the rest of my life.  My passion is for reclaiming for anyone who wishes to embrace it, a return to human scale and pace.  This dovetails, happily, with implementing sustainability and resilience into local communities across this land that seems to have simply lost its way in many regards.  That is where I’ll claim that you don’t have to flash a membership badge at the door of the Parva Project if you want to roll up your sleeves and pitch in.

I am here to suggest that being “green” doesn’t mean being left or right on the political spectrum.  I will violently jerk those arguments out of the hands of those who would usurp the green stole of rightness to gain votes for their ideological or political agenda.

How will the Parva Project accomplish it’s goals?

Web presence.  Printed resources.  Seminars and “webinars” and plain, gritty ol’ inspiration.  Of course the website will be the place where we all come together to rant and crow, but the printed resources will be an opportunity to spread the word about human scale and pace, which I hope becomes a household phrase in the next decade.  People have been talking around it for years, now it is time talk about it and implement it.  Y’all don’t even know what I’ve got up my sleeves in this regard, but you are going to love it.  I hope to do a limited number of seminars but this will be limited to the area I can cover on my touring bicycle, which isn’t inconsiderable.  For more information on this, check out my 100 Day Ride page.  For the most part we will be doing free “webinars.”  And as for inspiration?  I hope to share through every medium I can master, stories of people who are actually doing this, in addition to my own implementation of the Parva Project into my own life.  I’ll share those triumphs and failures with you regularly.

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