Is There Hope?

We have already established that I am not a morning person.  But I think I have been backsliding lately.  Last week, I decided to try out 6:30 am yoga classes.  Not only is this rather ambitious, it is also very challenging, in terms of time.  The class is a 90 minute class and, therefore, ends at 8am.  I start work at 9am and I work about a 40 minute subway trip from home and I have to fit a shower in.  Now that I am typing it all out, it seem a tad insane but thinking it through, it made complete sense.  

So to make this work takes planning.  I have to decide what I am going to wear and pack it in my sports bag the night before.  I must pack my shower gear and lay out the yoga wear as well.  Nothing must be left to do in the morning, except feed my fish, Gandanga.  

I wake up at 6am and head to the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth.  I change into the yoga gear, pull a coat on, grab the bags (I leave them near the door the night before) and I walk briskly to the studio.  About 100 minutes later, I am hitting the shower and changing into my work gear.  I make a brief stop at home to drop off the sweaty gear and feed Gandanga and then it is a fast walk to the subway station and off to work.  I am perfecting the art but that is the plan.

Now, to try to keep my body from being traumatised by ever-changing wake-up calls, I have resolved to wake up at 6am every day.  The thinking is that I'll get time in the morning to catch up on life.  Well, last week on Thursday, I woke up at 6am.  God only knows what I did with the time but I found myself rushing out of the house after 8am, with nothing to show for my wasted two hours but sleepiness.  Where did the time go?  What was I doing?

This morning I got some idea.  I think I applied Vaseline to my lips about 3 times.  I forgot stuff maybe twice and I misplaced my mittens and spent a good five minutes looking for them.  Sometimes I spill water while taking my iron and I have to mop up some.  I spend time getting my lunch together - I really should do that the night before.  Sometimes I sit down and find myself drifting off and thinking about how tired I am.  Next thing I know, it's five or ten minutes later.  I have been known to decide to iron some clothes because I think I have extra time.  And all is done in a daze.  

And all the time I wonder - how do people do it?  How do I get to the oiled-machine-get-up-and-go mode.  Most people take about 30 minutes to get ready in the morning - I'd be happy at 45.

Less Is... Less

The other day, Oscar brought some things back to the forefront of your mind.  Sometimes when things take effort, we push them to the back of our consciousness.  Why think about the effects of our actions when doing that may lead to having to do something about it?

A few weeks ago there was a man in the news.  Why, you may wonder?  Well, he was in the news for not throwing away any trash.  For a year.  He kept a record of the year and talked about the things he did in order to reduce waste in his life.  What most people did was read about him in the news, maybe talk about him next to the water cooler and then forget about him while taking out the daily trash.  Because there is a lot of trash generated in these United States and it is almost as though it is the right of the nation, nay, its duty, to create as much trash as possible.  Oh, and consume.

Just last week, I was listening to the radio and heard about how maybe this year or next China will over take the United States as the primary consumer of motor vehicles.  The population of the United States is 300 million, give or take.  The population of China is 1.3 billion - 4 times as much.  Oh, and the population of India is 1.1 billion - still over three times as much.  I throw that in because I remember listening to a show on radio where people were outraged because more Indians were buying cars.  The logic was - well we have had cars for so long so we can't live without them (and God forbid we have to give up our SUVs) and so India must sacrifice for the sake of the environment.  They don't deserve our wasteful luxuries.  I just think it's crazy that with so many people out there, the United States leads the way with the vehicles.

Instead we'll turn up the A/C as we drive our 10 miles to the gallon massive car - a car so huge it is practically scraping the sides of the buildings on either side of the street as it hulks on by - and we will marvel at this man who managed to accumulate only 8 yoghurt tubs with tops in 365 days.  All this enviro-babble; isn't it all up for debate still?  I mean, one could read the tips he lists for reducing the amount of waste created by day to day living but isn't it so much more fun to chat about it for fifteen minutes and then carry on with life as usual?

Hot Moo!

I'm a meat eater.  Those who have seen me at a barbeque might tell you that I eat more than my share of meat.  I might tell you that I could eat another steak.  However, no one would term me anything close to vegetarian.  I also have spent a lot of my life learning about holes in the ozone layer and the green house effect.  So, imagine my despair when I started hearing about how livestock causes more global warming damage than a lot of industry - perhaps all of industry.  It's all - yeah a field of cattle create more pollution than an oil refinery (or something).  And I wonder.  How?

What is that livestock doing that other wild beasts are not?  Farting, apparently.  And I know that a fart can smell bad.  I mean, you can be on a train and think you are going to die because a fart is that  stinky, but destroying the world?  Causing global warming?  And why just livestock?  Why not other vegetarian animals roaming the land?  Why can a giraffe be gassy to its heart's content, but a cow's gas can kill the world?  What is livestock eating?  Why is no one doing anything about it?  Are the world's cattle being fed baked beans?  

Are we going to have to start slipping gas-x into their food?

  

Awful Camouflage, If You Ask Me

There is a fashion trend sweeping the city that is just a bit beyond me.  Fur.  I try to figure out what the aim is and I just don't get it.  All it does is trigger questions from me.

Without us even going into the issues of how people come about this fur and what animals have to go through.  We live in a world where people pluck and electrocute and laser pretty much all the hair off our bodies so we can steal the hair of another beast's back. 

First of all, if you are caught in a rain or snow storm and your fur coat gets wet, do you smell like wet dog?

And then, um, why?  I am seriously freaked out by the whole beast fur - you know where someone makes a scarf out of, say, a dead fox and the mouth is biting on the tail.  How is this attractive?  And who decided on a for versus your favourite deceased cat or dog?

Oh... and the coats.  Are they supposed to be some kind of camouflage?  So that when the vampires come hunting for the humans, they see massive expanses of fur and think, well what huge ferrets, they kinda look like they have human heads but they must just be mutants.  Let us seek humans elsewhere.  

I don't know.  All that fur around my face would just tickle my nose and get me sneezing all the time.  

Maybe One Can Know Too Much

I have been listening to a podcast called "Stuff You Should Know". I think I subscribed because the title was almost a taunt - I mean, look at me - I'm no spring chicken and though I probably don't know how to learn a lesson, I think there is quite a bit I do know. Any show about stuff I should know would probably be full of stuff I really already know. I would spend the 20 minutes or so of the show rolling my eyes and wondering at the incredible ignorance of the world, while, of course, feeling completely superior and wise.

So much for that.

I found out the best places to get shot. I would have picked the little bit of hair just above my left ear but apparently it is the hands and feet. Some also suggested that being shot through the buttocks ( as in through the left cheek and out the right, or vice versa) is not so bad. Another suggestion was through the cheeks of the open mouth, making sure to not touch the tongue - one would be left with some dimples, but those are cute, right? That said, I am hoping that this is stuff I really never have to know.

Last week, I did find out something I should know. I did know about a huge island of trash, twice the size of Texas, floating in the Pacific Ocean. Scarier are the minute pieces of toxic plastic that are ingested by sea animals. What I did not know though is that there are levels in the realm of plastic recycling. It is an amazing thing and makes me wonder - why didn't I know this? Turns out that on the bottom of pretty much every plastic product is the recycling triangle with a number in it. This magic number basically tells you how recyclable the plastic is. The numbers range from 1 to 7 and the little triangle has us thinking that it is all recyclable. Rinse it out and throw it in a see-through plastic bag and it will not clog up a land fill or add towards the girth of garbage island. But no. Only 1 and 2 are really recyclable. The rest are basically just there to make us feel better about our trash. That's a lot of numbers of uselessness, if you ask me. And all of this so we can sit around telling ourselves that we are good people and saving the world, and meanwhile, back at the ranch, we are contributing to mountains of trash somewhere over the horizon.

Now, because of Stuff I Should Know, I am a shopper with OCD, not only checking to see if the food is something I want to eat but also if the packaging is something I want to throw away!