So.
1. Harry Potter. It goes without saying, that this cultural phenomenon reduced me to a giggling emotional mess for the better part of my weekend. I'm not saying anything even remotely opinionated, because I truly have to re-read it and sit with the whole thing a bit before I pass my Final Word (I put that in capitals like it was some celebrated news segment).
2. Harry, not so unbelievably, got me thinking a whole lot about some thematic subjects. That, and these two Famecast slams, both of which you should check out asap. Yeeesss, even if you have to relinquish your grib on Book 7 to do so.
Market For Ni$$ags
and
Heroes.
I have seen a lot of hate against cops, especially in the group of people I used to live with (radical anarchist vegans), and especially in young adults who go to Hampshire.
I think power-hungry people do terrible things. Want, need for admiration, for strength, to feel superior, for money, to prove yourself... it drives people to do terrible, terrible things. Sometimes things that are unforgiveable, atrocious. So then yes, there are bound to be a whole slew of policemen who make awful mistakes. Its both the nature of their job in relation to who they protect, and the type of person I think often wants to be a cop.
But do I HATE all policemen and women?
No, of course not. That would be as easy as a straight person saying: "I hate all gays." Or a cop saying: "I hate all Latinas."
When can you truly hate, with absolution, all of anything? Its too ignorant a posistion to take.
Every person who becomes a cop is different. Each person's motivation is different. And no one can say: "Oh, well why would you want to work for the man in the first place? That's selling out."
Because really, to truly change a system and make it fair, you can't only tear it down from the outside. You have to work on building it from the inside too.
To say we don't need cops, which is something I've heard said a lot, is completely absurd. Every country needs a infrastructure, and even if there was no such thing as poverty, no such thing as ghettos, no people who went without, and no child who didn't get to school... there would still be crime. There would still be murder, theft, selfishness and people who want more than they are given.
It's too easy to say "All of this is like this."
And grey area is too thick to point a finger without admitting that you, too, can be the bad guy.
Monday, July 23, 2007
Monday, July 16, 2007
Yesterday my boss pulled his back out, so he's not coming in this morning. However, I'm already in the office. Ergo:
(Office Productivity - Boss) x # of tasks on my personal to-do list = blog?
ehhh... that seems not quite right, but I never claimed to be a mathematician.
Anywhoooo, on to bigger equations:
Like every teenager on the planet, I never used to take care of my body. I filled myself with all the things nature never intended, all the things I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole now.
My best friend in high school and I skipped through the grocery store buying Kraft Mac and Cheese, giant clear plastic bags of gummy worms and skittles, diet Pepsi and pizza.
(That's not to say my stomach tolerated it very well. I just didn't listen enough back then to hear what my body was saying. Or screaming, as it was.)
Thing is, I wasn't raised on junk food and giant portions that way. It wasn't some "ingrained culture of American obesity" taught to me by my "ignorant parents".
My mom belonged to a local co-op, and I used to sit at the juice bar and drink carrot juice every day. I knew what rice-milk was before Whole Foods even existed. I definitely rebelled against that upbringing and all the weirdness I saw coming out of our grocery bags. But (it's killing me to type this) mom was right, and knew her shit before Whole Foods was synonymous with hipsterdom. And she always gave me a choice, and I've found my way back to that style of living on my own, for my own reasons. Which is how it should be -- I encourage everyone to question everything, for however long it takes to find their raison d'etre, so to speak.
But then, back I was I elementary school, veganism and green-living and wheatgrass shots were still lifestyle choices reserved for crunchy hippies (who were probably attending Hampshire College, har har.) and weird born-again beady-eyed cult leaders. Or, at least that was mainstream conceptualization of it. Never mind that generations of Buddhists have practiced vegetarianism in the centuries since their founder was still alive and preaching about it. Or that India makes up over 70% of the world's vegetarian population. Or that even the Torah mentions kosher Jews who abstained from meat altogether.
Still, until about 10 or so years ago, "vegetarian cuisine" on a restaurant menu was usually an iceberg salad and carrots. And my friends' Dads would usually narrow their eyes and grin over a steak marinating in juices, as they sliced a piece, stuffed it into their mouths and half-spat:
"Ya feel bad for the animals? You think its bad to kill them?"
Even now, in a culture where every other indie celebrity is newly meat-free, and there are entire cooking libraries dedicated to animal-free tables, I STILL get that retort from people I'm eating with. It's usually some really witty, cutting barb about how that cow would've died anyhow, so if I was trying to save I failed anyhow, or worse, it's a Thanksgiving where my uncle "accidentally" pours the roast drippings onto my lap.
I go to Wendy's with friends so they can grab some dinner, and there's always that guy. You know who I'm talking about. THAT. Guy.
The one who will always elbow my in the arm, lean over, and with burger in their mouth, joke:
"Want a bite?" ::insert raucous laughter and good natured ribbing::
Oh, ha ha ha. Clever.
Because no one's ever made that joke before, you're actually the first! And its still so fresh after the 300th time. Were ya holding onto that for a while? Just itching to spray me with your dinner and throw it out there?
Has anyone ever asked why I'm a vegetarian? Sometimes. The people that have usually never comment on it again, because my reasons are logical, thought out, and completely valid. And sure, the why I choose not to eat meat have distinctively morphed over my lifetime.
The thing is, it doesn't matter why I make the choices I do. It wouldn't matter what my reasons are -- as long I've sorted them out, they're inherently valid. And in this, and all other decisions about what I do with my body and my life, you don't have an open invitation to make commentary.
Yes, I'm a big proponent of sustainable and local agriculture, healthy food choices, and treating animals well. I stand behind those beliefs. And the thing is, the food choices YOU make affect me, and everyone else. Grazing cattle is one of the biggest drains on our environment and our soil. So when you choose to buy meat produced en masse on a farm like that, you are doing our environment no favors. And yes, chicken eggs are usually from chickens that lead sad little lives, locked in tiny boxes until they die.
So, yeah, actually, I would rather you buy the free-range eggs and the flank from a sustainable farm.
So it's not as if you live in a glass box, and all your choices are bouncing off the walls and not hitting anyone but yourself. And I have loads of other opinions about food, and agriculture, and cruelty, which make me wanna pick up you and your box and shake them both violently.
And still, I don't preach.
I cook meat for my friends who eat meat, when I can. I don't care about touching chicken. No, if you want pepperoni, I don't mind. In fact, you have the right to do whatever you want with your body, and your diet is yours alone. If you want to inject fertilizer up your ass and shave your head bald, I'd maintain my distance, but I'd still support your right to do it.
Have I ever pointed to your lamb chops, leaned over with my mouth full of seitan, given you a good soybean bath and inquired:
"So, how do you find your carcass tonight? Bloody?"
Why do most of you meat-eaters constantly feel the need to try and swindle us into tasting some veal? Or secretly put chicken in something, just to chide after we unwittingly ate it, that we must've liked it? Or proclaim my food inedible and every healthy snack I enjoy completely gross? I don't comment on what you eat, don't stand on my soap-box, or refuse to eat at your house, so what is your problem?
I have this friend who doesn't eat ketchup. More than that, he actually hates it ... you might even say he has a fear of ketchup. I look back on all the times a group of us would go out to eat and someone (and often, I regret to say, me) would joke about it. I know how tiresome it gets, how irritating the umpteenth one-liner is. And I feel so terrible that I couldn't see the connection between that, and my own situation.
I've don't lecture, or force other people to make the same decisions I've made. But even in this simple thing, in something so minute and so harmless as food, we still have an inability to make peace with any decision different from our own. And the knee-jerk reaction to different is to point out how it's wrong, and try to somehow force our own way, onto everyone else.
Maybe, when you're spitting cow all over me, or dangling a chicken wing in my face, I get so angry because it reminds me of some other parallels I see with my body, and what beliefs people try and lay right over it. Maybe that's why it strikes a nerve.
Or maybe, the next time you suck the barbeque sauce off your fingers and wink and comment on "how tasty your dead thing was", know that I'm envisioning what it would feel like to calmly smash your face into a big bowl of bean curd. So think about how you phrase that opinion, and how you come at me with your meaty self-rightousness. Cause one time, I swear I'm seriously going to do it.
(Office Productivity - Boss) x # of tasks on my personal to-do list = blog?
ehhh... that seems not quite right, but I never claimed to be a mathematician.
Anywhoooo, on to bigger equations:
Like every teenager on the planet, I never used to take care of my body. I filled myself with all the things nature never intended, all the things I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole now.
My best friend in high school and I skipped through the grocery store buying Kraft Mac and Cheese, giant clear plastic bags of gummy worms and skittles, diet Pepsi and pizza.
(That's not to say my stomach tolerated it very well. I just didn't listen enough back then to hear what my body was saying. Or screaming, as it was.)
Thing is, I wasn't raised on junk food and giant portions that way. It wasn't some "ingrained culture of American obesity" taught to me by my "ignorant parents".
My mom belonged to a local co-op, and I used to sit at the juice bar and drink carrot juice every day. I knew what rice-milk was before Whole Foods even existed. I definitely rebelled against that upbringing and all the weirdness I saw coming out of our grocery bags. But (it's killing me to type this) mom was right, and knew her shit before Whole Foods was synonymous with hipsterdom. And she always gave me a choice, and I've found my way back to that style of living on my own, for my own reasons. Which is how it should be -- I encourage everyone to question everything, for however long it takes to find their raison d'etre, so to speak.
But then, back I was I elementary school, veganism and green-living and wheatgrass shots were still lifestyle choices reserved for crunchy hippies (who were probably attending Hampshire College, har har.) and weird born-again beady-eyed cult leaders. Or, at least that was mainstream conceptualization of it. Never mind that generations of Buddhists have practiced vegetarianism in the centuries since their founder was still alive and preaching about it. Or that India makes up over 70% of the world's vegetarian population. Or that even the Torah mentions kosher Jews who abstained from meat altogether.
Still, until about 10 or so years ago, "vegetarian cuisine" on a restaurant menu was usually an iceberg salad and carrots. And my friends' Dads would usually narrow their eyes and grin over a steak marinating in juices, as they sliced a piece, stuffed it into their mouths and half-spat:
"Ya feel bad for the animals? You think its bad to kill them?"
Even now, in a culture where every other indie celebrity is newly meat-free, and there are entire cooking libraries dedicated to animal-free tables, I STILL get that retort from people I'm eating with. It's usually some really witty, cutting barb about how that cow would've died anyhow, so if I was trying to save I failed anyhow, or worse, it's a Thanksgiving where my uncle "accidentally" pours the roast drippings onto my lap.
I go to Wendy's with friends so they can grab some dinner, and there's always that guy. You know who I'm talking about. THAT. Guy.
The one who will always elbow my in the arm, lean over, and with burger in their mouth, joke:
"Want a bite?" ::insert raucous laughter and good natured ribbing::
Oh, ha ha ha. Clever.
Because no one's ever made that joke before, you're actually the first! And its still so fresh after the 300th time. Were ya holding onto that for a while? Just itching to spray me with your dinner and throw it out there?
Has anyone ever asked why I'm a vegetarian? Sometimes. The people that have usually never comment on it again, because my reasons are logical, thought out, and completely valid. And sure, the why I choose not to eat meat have distinctively morphed over my lifetime.
The thing is, it doesn't matter why I make the choices I do. It wouldn't matter what my reasons are -- as long I've sorted them out, they're inherently valid. And in this, and all other decisions about what I do with my body and my life, you don't have an open invitation to make commentary.
Yes, I'm a big proponent of sustainable and local agriculture, healthy food choices, and treating animals well. I stand behind those beliefs. And the thing is, the food choices YOU make affect me, and everyone else. Grazing cattle is one of the biggest drains on our environment and our soil. So when you choose to buy meat produced en masse on a farm like that, you are doing our environment no favors. And yes, chicken eggs are usually from chickens that lead sad little lives, locked in tiny boxes until they die.
So, yeah, actually, I would rather you buy the free-range eggs and the flank from a sustainable farm.
So it's not as if you live in a glass box, and all your choices are bouncing off the walls and not hitting anyone but yourself. And I have loads of other opinions about food, and agriculture, and cruelty, which make me wanna pick up you and your box and shake them both violently.
And still, I don't preach.
I cook meat for my friends who eat meat, when I can. I don't care about touching chicken. No, if you want pepperoni, I don't mind. In fact, you have the right to do whatever you want with your body, and your diet is yours alone. If you want to inject fertilizer up your ass and shave your head bald, I'd maintain my distance, but I'd still support your right to do it.
Have I ever pointed to your lamb chops, leaned over with my mouth full of seitan, given you a good soybean bath and inquired:
"So, how do you find your carcass tonight? Bloody?"
Why do most of you meat-eaters constantly feel the need to try and swindle us into tasting some veal? Or secretly put chicken in something, just to chide after we unwittingly ate it, that we must've liked it? Or proclaim my food inedible and every healthy snack I enjoy completely gross? I don't comment on what you eat, don't stand on my soap-box, or refuse to eat at your house, so what is your problem?
I have this friend who doesn't eat ketchup. More than that, he actually hates it ... you might even say he has a fear of ketchup. I look back on all the times a group of us would go out to eat and someone (and often, I regret to say, me) would joke about it. I know how tiresome it gets, how irritating the umpteenth one-liner is. And I feel so terrible that I couldn't see the connection between that, and my own situation.
I've don't lecture, or force other people to make the same decisions I've made. But even in this simple thing, in something so minute and so harmless as food, we still have an inability to make peace with any decision different from our own. And the knee-jerk reaction to different is to point out how it's wrong, and try to somehow force our own way, onto everyone else.
Maybe, when you're spitting cow all over me, or dangling a chicken wing in my face, I get so angry because it reminds me of some other parallels I see with my body, and what beliefs people try and lay right over it. Maybe that's why it strikes a nerve.
Or maybe, the next time you suck the barbeque sauce off your fingers and wink and comment on "how tasty your dead thing was", know that I'm envisioning what it would feel like to calmly smash your face into a big bowl of bean curd. So think about how you phrase that opinion, and how you come at me with your meaty self-rightousness. Cause one time, I swear I'm seriously going to do it.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.
The Jena Six.
Even if you do nothing else today, read about this case.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
Martin Luther King Jr.
I don't have much to say about this. It leaves me wordless.
Even if you do nothing else today, read about this case.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
Martin Luther King Jr.
I don't have much to say about this. It leaves me wordless.
Monday, July 9, 2007
bad news all around today.
My favorite magazine of all time, Jane (which was reconstructed from the hip-alt-indie skeleton of beloved Sassy) will be folding next month.
Jane magazine has sustained me through stupid yet numerous bouts of self-indulgent hipster crisises - "Holy Jesus, what do I wear this Purple Thrift suede jacket with?" "Can I somehow rock a retro-bikini with biker boots?" "My hair will never be avant-garde enough to live in New York."
Of course, Jane is made out of paper, and never answered back.
(Although I always felt like after reading an issue, I could probably rock a black plastic bag, if I so choosed.)
But more than that, Jane made me feel like there's a place for cheeky psuedo-bitter bohemian feminists who care about culture, politics, and human rights, but who could also care about music, art, fashion, literature and dinner parties - which didn't neccesitate a personal compromise. It was silly, loud-mouthed, introspective and self-depricating, like that friend that tells you the truth about your answering-the-door-in-your-underwear-habit, but somehow doesn't make you feel shitty about it.
Jane never sacrificed it's strange coolness for mainstream beauty, and it never put a 'how to beat your hangover" article before a piece about a 20 year old grad students who died of Cervical Cancer (prior to nationwide awareness of about HPV, they told their readers to get tested NOW). They encouraged their readers to ask for raises at work, more playtime and toys in bed, and more representation in government and academia. Jane's fashion shoots were irreverent and sexy; plus size models with skull tattoos and women across the country they photographed on the street. They published an article celebrating breasts, with full frontal nudity, even after the magazine was blackmailed not to publish the pictures. And where else would you find a magazine that could put both Zooey Deschanel and Kate Beckinsale on the same cover?
It might be absurd to eulogize a magazine, but its more than that.
Jane folding signifies to me, more than anything else, the shift that has taken in female culture -- girls don't want to be opinionated, intelligent, driven, conscious jet-setters full of riot and cleverness. They want glorified catalogues of hangers, telling them the same useless drivel repackaged every other month in a different font. Well I don't want to please my man, I don't want to know how to tame my wild curls, I already have a billion fucking conditioners and I don't care about Jennifer Aniston anymore. I want to please myself, and with no regrets, exist how I am. I just wish that was enough.
Sassy, nee Jane, 1988- 2007. Long live Jane.
My favorite magazine of all time, Jane (which was reconstructed from the hip-alt-indie skeleton of beloved Sassy) will be folding next month.
Jane magazine has sustained me through stupid yet numerous bouts of self-indulgent hipster crisises - "Holy Jesus, what do I wear this Purple Thrift suede jacket with?" "Can I somehow rock a retro-bikini with biker boots?" "My hair will never be avant-garde enough to live in New York."
Of course, Jane is made out of paper, and never answered back.
(Although I always felt like after reading an issue, I could probably rock a black plastic bag, if I so choosed.)
But more than that, Jane made me feel like there's a place for cheeky psuedo-bitter bohemian feminists who care about culture, politics, and human rights, but who could also care about music, art, fashion, literature and dinner parties - which didn't neccesitate a personal compromise. It was silly, loud-mouthed, introspective and self-depricating, like that friend that tells you the truth about your answering-the-door-in-your-underwear-habit, but somehow doesn't make you feel shitty about it.
Jane never sacrificed it's strange coolness for mainstream beauty, and it never put a 'how to beat your hangover" article before a piece about a 20 year old grad students who died of Cervical Cancer (prior to nationwide awareness of about HPV, they told their readers to get tested NOW). They encouraged their readers to ask for raises at work, more playtime and toys in bed, and more representation in government and academia. Jane's fashion shoots were irreverent and sexy; plus size models with skull tattoos and women across the country they photographed on the street. They published an article celebrating breasts, with full frontal nudity, even after the magazine was blackmailed not to publish the pictures. And where else would you find a magazine that could put both Zooey Deschanel and Kate Beckinsale on the same cover?
It might be absurd to eulogize a magazine, but its more than that.
Jane folding signifies to me, more than anything else, the shift that has taken in female culture -- girls don't want to be opinionated, intelligent, driven, conscious jet-setters full of riot and cleverness. They want glorified catalogues of hangers, telling them the same useless drivel repackaged every other month in a different font. Well I don't want to please my man, I don't want to know how to tame my wild curls, I already have a billion fucking conditioners and I don't care about Jennifer Aniston anymore. I want to please myself, and with no regrets, exist how I am. I just wish that was enough.
Sassy, nee Jane, 1988- 2007. Long live Jane.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
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.
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.
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