Canned Carrot Good

Dear Canned Carrot Good,*

First of all, I'd like to start off by saying that you do great work and I support you completely. I think carrot goods are great, but I also firmly believe in CANNED carrot goods. And I understand that right now you are fighting an uphill battle given that the current administration's answer to uncanned carrot goods is, "Don't think about carrots." (Wait, I might be mixing my metaphors here.)

But anyway, I appreciate your pragmatism. You know that, like it or not, teenagers have carrots on the brain, and so we need to teach them about how to ... can. (Okay, now the metaphor is totally screwed up.)

The point is, I support you. I support you so much, that I already give you a regular contribution that is deducted from my credit card every month. I would like to support you more, but you know, I have a couple other charity organizations I support, and I'm not super rich. So I give you what I can.

In light of this, I would really, really like it, if you did not send me a solicitation letter every other day asking me to donate MORE money. I hate this for two reasons. One, it kills trees. Two, I hate to see you spending money to mail me things, when you could be devoting your scarce resources somewhere else.

Look, I promise you, when I win the lottery, I'll send you more money. Okay? And, you know what? You can also send me all the email you want. I don't mind. Seriously. But PLEASE. PLEASE, STOP sending me snail mail. It's driving me nutty.

Thanks for all your work.

Your friend,
Arduous

*Name changed to protect the innocent

Titles Are For People Who Are Not Really Cranky Right Now

You know that thing, where you're not sick. You're not. You don't have any real symptoms, you're not coughing, you're not sneezing, but you feel really, really ick all the time?

That's me for the past week. I guess I should be glad it's not a full-blown cold, but instead I'm just being a Miss Cranky Pants and wishing I was in bed eating chicken soup (preferably made by magical elves who would also do the dishes after they finish making the soup) and watching some TV.

Sadly I do not have magical elves. But I do have a crockpot. If anyone has a good, easy recipe for some comfort food, I'd love you forever and ever.

Garbage Diary Day 2

Work

Recycled:
29 Christmas cards
2 letters
2 envelopes
4 brochures
9 DVDs
1 postcard
Cracker Box

Trash:
2 clementine orange peels
Plastic bag inside box of crackers

I didn't actually throw anything away at home.

One word. Plastics

Okay, I knew plastics were sort of evil, right, or at least I understood this in theory. But I always assumed, hey, it's recyclable. And nothing recyclable can be that bad, right?

Well it turns out plastics aren't SORT of evil. They're really evil. Here's what Elizabeth Royte has to say about plastics in Garbage Land:

Plastic isn't truly recyclable in the way that glass, metals, and fibers are. Streams of mixed plastic can be turned into only one other product (plastic wood, garden pavers, or toothbrush handles, for example). When their useful life is over, these products cannot be "recycled" again. They have to be burned or buried. Either way, they add toxins to the environment. Unmixed streams are another matter: they actually can be refashioned into bottles and containers. But there isn't much demand from their makers for recycled plastic. Virgin is so much cheaper.

So basically, every time you throw a plastic bottle into the recycling bin, you are merely delaying the plastic's trip to the landfill. Yes, recycling is better than not, but we really should just reduce our plastic waste. While I'm not ready to go plastic free, I'm going to make more of an attempt to buy things in glass bottles, and to reuse the plastic containers I buy.

Garbage Diary Day 1

At Work:

Trash:
Three tea-bag packets
Three tea bags
Plastic envelope
Plastic wrapper for sponge*
Cap for the water cooler bottle*
Peels of two clementine oranges

Recycled:
Small piece of cardboard from tea carton
Aluminum tab off box of soup
Cardboard strip from box of crackers

*I almost didn't include these items, because I felt like this wasn't really *my* trash- I didn't order a new sponge, it was sitting on the sink. And everyone uses the water cooler. Wasn't this our communal trash, not my own? But then I realized that communal trash is at once everyone's trash and no one's trash. If I didn't claim this as my own, no one would. As I had thrown it away, it was mine.

At Home

Trash:
3 paper towels
Baggage Tag
Tinfoil Wrapper off of a wine bottle
Cork for wine bottle
Pizza box
Loose tea leaves
Fines (a word coined by William Rathje to define hair, dust, floor sweepings, and the other stuff that settles to the bottom of the can.)

Recycled:
Bulk mail packet
2 envelopes
1 solicitation letter
1 catalog (Augh! How many times do you have to ask to be taken off, already?!)

Weight of house trash (recycling not included):
About a pound? It was pretty hard to tell with a normal bathroom scale.

The trash from the house is mostly left over from the weekend. I had a very close friend of mine from college visiting, and we were so busy hanging out, that much of the detritus of the weekend never made it to the trash until today. The paper towels were ones he used; I have some on hand for guests' convenience. The pizza box and cork are from a meal over the weekend- it was raining and we didn't feel like going out. The actual wine bottle made it to my bag of "things to recycle" on Sunday.

All in all, I did pretty well, though I suspect that this may partly be due to the observer effect- by observing my garbage, I also affected it, by throwing out less than I normally might. It'll be interesting to see what happens as I get more used to the trash diary. If the observer effect gradually disappears, my trash should increase over the course of the week.

Getting Trashy

I've started reading "Garbage Land," and I have to say, trash is a lot more interesting than I would have thought! Or maybe it's just that Elizabeth Royte makes it interesting. One of the more fascinating points she brings up is about the history of trash. At the beginning of the twentieth century- reducing, reusing and recycling wasn't just for the environmentally conscious, but was built into the fabric of society. Virgin resources were expensive, so people reused everything. Food waste was fed to pigs, even in New York City, which was home to 100,000 pigs in the late 1800s. Chicken bones were given to the rag and bone man. In short, one hundred years ago, society was set up for reuse, whereas today's society is set up for disposability. Royte offers us some hard statistics about our disposable culture: According to the EPA, the average American throws out 4.5 pounds of garbage per day.

4.5 pounds! How much did my garbage weigh, I started to wonder. I feel like I'm relatively conscious of what I throw out, but doesn't everyone think they throw out less than they actually do?

So for one week, starting today, I'm keeping a diary of everything I'm throwing or recycling. I'm going to do it for both home and work, but only the stuff at home is getting weighed because I'm not carting my work trash home to weigh. And since I don't have a kitchen scale, the trash is getting weighed on a bathroom scale, so I'm only going to have a rough idea of what it weighs, but I still think it will be illuminating. I'm also interested in this from an anthropological point of view, because doesn't everyone say that your trash says a lot about who you are? From half a day of diarying, I can already tell you, that my trash is telling me that I'm an obsessive tea drinker. Ah well. A girl's gotta have a few vices.

Raindrops on Roses

It's twenty after midnight, and I am cozily snuggled up under my down comforter with my book by my side. Through my window I can hear the soothing constant patter of rain.

There's nothing more I love than being warm in my bed on a rainy night. I am particularly grateful to not be driving the flooded streets of LA right now. It is true what they say, that Angelenos are woefully bad at driving in the rain. Though in our defense, it is not so easy to drive our flooded streets -our drainage system can't handle anything beyond a drizzle and anywhere the road dips, the water collects, which means you'll be merrily driving down Melrose and then Melrose will turn into a small pond. (Also, LA traffic gods? You might want to think about REFLECTIVE PAINT on the roads. You know the kind? The kind that is in EVERY OTHER PLACE IN THE COUNTRY? The kind that let's you see where the lanes are when it's raining at night, so you don't accidentally veer off into the next lane? Yeah, that.)

Time for bed. The first full work week of the year starts today.