and i guess i'm pretty different now... considering.

"Scientists can erase bad memories", says the BBC NEWS headline.

So, in a Vonnegut-esque twist, life imitates art -- the art being Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

"A US and Canadian team used a drug called propranolol to target unwanted memories, while leaving others intact.

They injected the drug, which is more often used to treat heart patients, while a volunteer was asked to recall a painful memory.

The Journal of Psychiatric Research study found that this seemed to disrupt the way the memory was then stored."

If the measure of a human being is how they deal with adversity, then what is the measure of a person who erases it?

The thing that really bothers me about this, is ethically ... actually, there are a plethora of issues which tug at my ethical brain-strings. Other than the fact that the byline is a gross exaggeration. Not the least of which begs the question: who gets to erase what?
Would I erase the worst experiences of my life? Well I think that covers two ends of a spectrum-

1. Horrible things which have happened to me.
2. Terrible things I have done.

Number 2 things are mine forever, my constant reminders to think before I act, to remember other's feelings, and to consider karma. Number 1 things... well, I'm still here and (mostly) functioning.
So those things are my immunizations -- they may prepare me for more perilous seas ahead. Or maybe I'll never come into contact with them again, but thank goodness I survived. Either way, there is nothing in me or of me that I'd erase.
Then again, my life is privileged, I have no cavities and I haven't seen war.

Would we erase Firefighter's September 11th? What about Holocaust victim's digging their neighbor's shallow graves? The child armies in Darfur and Sudan? What about incest, torture, rape? If we could mass prescribe, would we all forget Vietnam together?

So this week's theme is consciousness.
Not only on this blog, but in life. All of life is a stage sometimes, and the writer apparently thickens the plot by commingling pure coincidence with an eery sense that it's all meant to be yelling something at you.
So, listen.

Thusly, this week is about being aware, being present. And grabbing a fistful those wriggly crawly worms out of your skull... you know the ones I'm talking about. They're burrowed in your brain, and every time you have to make a choice and you press 'easy' instead of 'right' (because rarely are those two buttons in synchronicity) they grow a little squirmier. They breathe guilt and eat shit, and for some reason we have a need to just keep on feeding them. So unhinge your jaw, reach up there, and dredge some out, because they need an examination.

Here's a small, but fat one --
I buy Fiji water. I admit, the pretty design, the lure of lush tropical waterfalls pouring my untouched beverage straight into the bottle, the real or imagined threat of pollutants in my drink. Now, to defend myself, I re-use the bottle until that inevitable moment in the morning where I realize, in horror, I've mindlessly recycled the cap. Then, of course, the cap I stole from a Seltzer bottle leaks all over my bag, and I end up just buying another one during my lunch hour. But I reuse! (hey, a girl gets a few excuses.)

Now, occasionally, I buy a Smart Water. Yes, it's Glaceau, but thirsty beggars can't be choosy. In comparison, Fiji seems the more natural choice of the bottled water family, I mean, it has a waterfall and some green backgroundy stuff on the label, and it comes from an underground volcanic cavern. On the SmartWater side, it's ...vapor distilled in a factory.

About a week ago, I overheard a conversation on the subway. The line that struck me was this: "Buying bottled water for your health is all well and good, but how many gallons of oil are used trucking your water to you?"

So I did a little research, and afterwards felt guilty even carrying the Fiji bottle around.

Both Charles Fishman via Salon.com and Pablo via TreeHugger put it brilliantly, and I'll let them speak for themselves.

"The label on a bottle of Fiji Water says 'from the islands of Fiji.' Journey to the source of that water, and you realize just how extraordinary that promise is. From New York, for instance, it is an 18-hour plane ride west and south (via Los Angeles) almost to Australia, and then a four-hour drive along Fiji's two-lane King's Highway. Every bottle of Fiji Water goes on its own version of this trip, in reverse, although by truck and ship. In fact, since the plastic for the bottles is shipped to Fiji first, the bottles' journey is even longer. Half the wholesale cost of Fiji Water is transportation--which is to say, it costs as much to ship Fiji Water across the oceans and truck it to warehouses in the United States than it does to extract the water and bottle it.

That is not the only environmental cost embedded in each bottle of Fiji Water. The Fiji Water plant is a state-of-the-art facility that runs 24 hours a day. That means it requires an uninterrupted supply of electricity--something the local utility structure cannot support. So the factory supplies its own electricity, with three big generators running on diesel fuel. The water may come from 'one of the last pristine ecosystems on earth,' as some of the labels say, but out back of the bottling plant is a less pristine ecosystem veiled with a diesel haze." - Fishman

And Pablo:
"In summary, the manufacture and transport of that one kilogram bottle of Fiji water consumed 26.88 kilograms of water (7.1 gallons) .849 Kilograms of fossil fuel (one litre or .26 gal) and emitted 562 grams of Greenhouse Gases (1.2 pounds)."

Now, admittedly, there is barely any action which doesn't leave an ecological footprint. Jointedly, Pablo alters his numbers later, and what ensues is a primal debate about fluoride and arsenic, neither of which I'm even going to TOUCH in this post.

Howev:
"Fiji Water produces more than a million bottles a day, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have reliable drinking water."
Fiji, after a military coup several years ago, two mutinies and a dissolved Parliament, is still building its recovering infrastructure. Fiji hardly has enough potable water for it's local citizens; at a Youth forum in 2003, Rakiraki High School students cited feces, bacteria, spread of scabies, and raw sewage as only some of the problems that the 40-50% of citizens had in their daily drinking water.

Now, whether this follows logic or not, to me there is something innately fucked about bottling cheap water in a country with a limited supply of its own. Furthermore, will I ever suffer any debilitating health effects from drinking via the tap that would convince me it's alright to produce that many pollutants per bottle for my water habit? No.

I still want to drink bottled water, because even if added fluoride and other chemicals "do nothing" ... I'd rather not take the chance that they might. And besides, why have anything but H20 in my water at all? With that said, buying a Pyrex glass bottle and filling it from a Brita everyday takes neither excessive effort nor cost. And glass doesn't leech, clog landfills, or use as resources to produce.

So there's a wriggly little worm. I know I should stop buying bottled water just because I idealize it. And not investigating where something I stand behind comes from, well that's just lazy. Being conscious of my actions...
(Do you buy organic, or do you buy local? Do you forgo healthful greens because they're not in season, or do you put only whole foods into your body? Is your loyalty to yourself, or to the environment?)

As for the first part of this diatribe, if I had feces in my drinking water growing up, I'd sure love to take a drug and forget that. But then, I doubt I would be able to afford one pill of a memory-eraser.

Just because you CAN, doesn't mean you should.