Wordless Wednesday #10--Lone Walker

For another one of my Wordless Wednesday photos, see my other blog. For other people's see wordlesswednesday.com.

Improg word: Underwear

*For those of you wondering what the heck an improg is, it’s an improvisational blog entry. My improg partner, Hayley, came up with the idea of sending each other an envelope full of words. Once a week, we each pull out a word and write something about it.

You can be part of the fun! Leave a comment, submit a word (see Hayley’s post here for instructions), or—if you’re really brave—you might even like to become an improgger yourself. We’d be happy to have you join us!

Thanks so much, Hayley, for including underwear in your envelope of words.

I have nothing interesting or funny to say about my own underwear. Nor do I have pictures to share. I can hear your collective sigh of relief.

The interesting thing about underwear is that what people wear under their clothes may have little to do with the image they present to the world. Maybe that mom in the grocery store is sporting silk and lace under her sweats. Maybe that tired-looking woman with the bad haircut you see on the bus every day wears leopard-print thongs. Maybe the hot young thing down the street favors granny panties. Maybe your boss wears no underwear at all under his three-piece suit. (I had such a boss many years ago. Unfortunately, his lack of support in the nether regions was all too obvious.)

What the world sees on the surface might not be a complete representation of who we are. That busy, efficient woman you admire so much, who seems so organized, so together? Maybe underneath she’s clinging on for dear life. That near-perfect family next door? Maybe behind their front door is a house full of cold silence and repressed anger. That guy who works at the convenience store? Maybe in his home country he was a brain surgeon and inside his head is the knowledge needed to save lives, if only he could use it here. And that tired looking woman on the bus? Maybe she’s so tired because she moonlights as a belly dancer.

People often dress themselves—both figuratively and literally—in what others expect them to wear. We moved across town when I was a teenager and my friends at my new school—a rather unwild bunch—would have been shocked to know the shenanigans I got up to with my friends from my old neighborhood after church. When I decided to go to university after a couple of years working for the inadequately clad boss, a lot of the people I worked with were surprised, thinking of me as a ditzy blonde waitress with a fondness for parties. During my (ridiculous number of) years at university, some people were surprised to hear of the trouble I got into during high school, thinking of me as a brainy, hippy-type academic.

The people I know now are surprised about both my colorful past and my (ridiculous number of) years at university. And, yes, they’ve even been surprised by my underwear. At Brownie camp a couple of years ago, as the other leaders and I got ready for bed, one exclaimed at what was under my jeans. Although it wasn’t particularly racy (this was Brownie camp, after all), I guess it wasn’t what she expected me to be wearing. All this surprise over the idea that I had adventures in my youth or was an academic or wore black bikinis with white polka dots makes me wonder just what image I’m currently projecting—boring, not very smart, someone who wears white briefs up to her armpits?

I told Hayley that I probably wasn’t going to do an improg entry this week because I’ve been having some hard days lately. I used to frequent a dark hole of depression, sometimes bringing along enough camping equipment and food to stay there for weeks. In the past several years, I’ve teetered on the edge at times, but for the most part I’ve kept my footing. A few days ago I fell in head first. I’ve been sitting here in the dark (illuminated yesterday by a brilliant ray of sunshine in the form of an email from Margerie’s daughter, who invited me to her birthday party), eating cookies and not feeling like doing much of anything.

But then I pulled out this ridiculous word from Hayley’s envelope, and in between my regular chauffeuring duties and work, I’ve sat here in the dark hole thinking about it. And I’ve realized that I might look okay on the outside—a little frumpy, maybe, and in desperate need of a haircut, but still okay—but on the inside my emotional underwear is tattered and torn. I’ve been trying to patch it up, with a stitch here and a stitch there and a safety pin in the elastic, but it’s not working anymore. (Oh, and just so you know, my actual, physical underwear is not in such bad shape.)

I’ve been working really hard to improve things in my life this year, but, just like with clothes, no matter how nice the stuff on the outside, I won’t feel truly comfortable or confident if I’m wearing worn-out underwear that’s threatening to fall down around my knees.

Green Friday: Buried in junk mail, part 1--catalogues

I, as you might know, am postally obsessed, but even I hate getting junk mail.

Twenty or so years ago, when environmentalists were seen as long-haired, wacky university students, my husband and I (who were long-haired university students) did some wacky things to slow the flow of junk mail coming through our mail slot. We stuffed it into postage-paid envelopes and sent it back. We regularly sent huge envelopes of it to the federal minister of the environment, asking for regulations or programs to be set up to reduce unwanted mail. Glossy paper wasn’t recyclable then, so I would call companies that sent glossy advertisements and (politely) berate them.

It’s gotten a bit easier to say no to junk mail. In this post I’m going to talk about the fattest, heaviest form of junk mail there is: the mail-order catalog.

According to Catalog Choice, producing the 19 billion catalogues mailed to U.S. households each year uses 3.6 million tons of paper made from 53 million trees. The energy used to make this paper is enough to power 1.2 million homes for a year; 5.2 million tons of carbon dioxide are emitted (that’s equivalent to a year’s worth of emissions from 2 million cars) and 53 billion gallons of waster water are produced (that’s 81,000 Olympic-sized pools).

Yikes! How much of those resources is going straight from the forest and factory into the garbage without serving any useful purpose?

Of all the catalogues that get crammed into our dinky mailbox, only one ever gets read: my daughter spends hours poring over her American Girl catalogue four times a year. The rest get a cursory glance to see if there are any pages that would be good for making envelopes or for a craft project, and then they go straight into the recycling box (well, truth be told, more often than not they sit around on my office floor for quite a while before that cursory glance).

If I want to browse a retailer’s catalogue, I do it online. It’s true that you can’t curl up on the couch with a cup of tea and an online catalogue the way you can with a print one, or bring it into the bathroom with you. But it saves resources and I spend less money. Instead of a beautiful glossy catalogue arriving unexpectedly in the mail to tempt me to buy things I wouldn’t otherwise have thought of buying, I go online when I need something.

Even though we don’t read them, we still receive a lot of catalogues. We even get them addressed to people who lived here years ago. Since this is “Enough garbage, already” month for me, I’m adding another step to my glance-and-toss catalogue processing routine: finding out how to stop them from arriving at all. As each one arrives, I contact the company and ask to get off their mailing list.

If you live in the United States, there’s an easy way to stop receiving catalogues you don’t want or duplicates. At Catalog Choice, you can ask to be removed from the mailing lists of approximately 200 merchants who have pledged to honor your request (thanks, Hayley, for this information).

Keep in mind that merchants don’t want to give up your address, especially if you have purchased from them in the past. It may take some time and perseverance to get off those mailing lists. But more and more retailers are waking up to the fact that sending catalogues to people who don’t want them is a waste of resources and money.

Wordless Wednesday #9: Ready, Set, . . .

For another one of my Wordless Wednesday photos, see my other blog. For other people's see wordlesswednesday.com.

Improg word: Complete

For those of you wondering what the heck an improg is, it’s an improvisational blog entry. My improg partner, Hayley, came up with the idea of sending each other an envelope full of words. Once a week, we each pull out a word and write something about it.

You can be part of the fun! Leave a comment, submit a word (see Hayley’s post here for instructions), or—if you’re really brave—you might even like to become an improgger yourself. We’d be happy to have you join us!

The word I pulled today is complete. Now, Hayley hasn’t specified if this is the adjective or the verb, so I guess it’s up to me to decide. Complete (v.) has actually been on my mind lately, so I’ll go with that.

For several years now I’ve had trouble completing things. As far as I can remember, this was not a problem I had when I was a kid, probably because in our house it wasn’t allowed to be a problem. We had to complete things. If we took a toy out, we had to put it back before we took out another one. Chores had to be done first—and that meant done, complete, finished. No forgetting to put the vacuum back in the closet or leaving a fork unwashed at the side of the sink.

So as a kid and a teenager and a young adult, I finished what I started. I read one book before starting the next one. I even finished one craft project before starting the next one (yes, I really did). When I went back to school, I completed assignments days ahead of the due date. That was just the way I lived.

And then I moved in with my husband. He is not a natural finisher, nor does he do things in a linear manner. We once shared a community garden plot with friends of ours, one of whom had a very rigid way of doing things. When we broke the sod on the plot, she worked in completely straight lines, left to right, left to right; my husband worked a bit over here and then a bit over there and then somewhere else entirely. When we planted, she drew straight furrows in the dirt and measured out planting holes according to the distance recommended on the package; he was happy to scatter the seeds in a vague line. He drove her nuts.

So when I moved in with him, I relaxed a bit. Well, a lot. I still got my assignments done on time, but rarely early. I soon had several craft projects on the go at all times. I no longer lived by a strict get-this-done-before-you-start-that rule.

Once I had kids, my problems with completion really grew. Over the next few years, between being sleep deprived and constantly having to change a diaper or clean up regurgitated milk or answer a question like “Where do the stars come from?” or watch impromptu concerts and plays, I really didn’t have time to finish anything in one go. I did manage to complete some things, most notably two degrees, just not very efficiently. And many, many things went unfinished. But I thought that the problem would resolve itself once my children went to school.

Alas, no. They've been in school for years now and I still don't complete things. My life is still full of interruptions. Worse than that, somewhere in all those loads of laundry I seem to have misplaced my ability to focus on the task at hand (it’s probably with all those socks that go missing in the dryer). I dither. I dilly-dally. I take on too much and flit from one thing to another. I have the attention span of a toddler.

One of my goals in my Year of Living Differently is to rediscover my ability to complete what I start and to learn to let go of things that I really don’t want to be doing. I don’t want to live by an inflexible rule—there’s a lot to be said for having 15 projects to choose from at any one time. But I do want to complete the things that are important to me.

As for the adjective, I hope I never feel truly complete. If I were to die in an avalanche of dust balls as I opened the hall closet one day, I would like to feel satisfied with my life. The quest for that feeling of satisfaction is what’s driving me in this year-long project. But I don’t want to feel like I’ve done all I want to do, been all I want to be, read everything I want to read, seen everything I want to see. I don’t want to get to the point where the world isn’t interesting to me anymore, where I feel like I’ve done it all.

Green Friday: Disposing of Medications

Due to popular demand (well, Margerie), on Fridays I share some ideas for how to lessen our impact on the environment. But I don't have a PhD in this, so please share your own ideas with me!

As part of my “Enough garbage, already!” month, I weeded our medicine box of expired medications. This brings up the question of what to do with them. We used to be told to mush them up and put them in the garbage or to flush them down the toilet so no kids or animals would accidentally ingest them.

However, recent studies have found traces of medications in the water of cities all over North America. In fact, although this has been big news lately, it’s not new news. Back in 2004, the Vancouver Sun reported on a study that found traces of nine drugs, including Prozac, in drinking water plants in Ontario, and mentioned that the US and European countries had been studying this issue longer than Canada had.

Nobody knows what effects the long-term exposure to traces of medications in the water, soil, and, potentially, the food supply could have on our health, not to mention on the health of wildlife, or whether throwing antibiotics away could contribute to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Some experts say there’s no need to worry, but we’ve heard that about pesticides, hormones, and plastic, all of which are a cause for concern now. So, to me, it makes sense to look for safer ways to get rid of those bottles that have been collecting in the back of your medicine cabinet.

This year, the 21 municipalities of the Metro Vancouver area banned the disposal of any kind of medications in the garbage. Here in BC, we’ve been lucky enough to have a free medication return program since the 1990s. You can bring expired or unused prescription and over-the-counter medications to almost any pharmacy (95% of the province’s pharmacies participate) for safe disposal. In 2006, almost 20 tons of medication were kept out of the landfills and the water through this program. I bet the potential is much higher, since a lot of people here don’t even know the program exists.

When we lived in California for a few years, I assumed I could do the same thing there, but when I asked, the pharmacists looked at me like I was crazy (I'm sure I looked crazy, since I'd just finished grocery shopping with a toddler and a baby in tow) and told me to flush them. Things are changing, though, and medication return programs like this one are popping up all over. If you don’t have a program in your area, find out if you can dispose of medications through your city’s hazardous waste program. If you live in Canada, you can find information on how to dispose of medications at the Medications Return Program website.

If you want to read more about this issue, here are a couple of resources:
US Environmental Protection Agency: Pharmaceutical and Personal Care Products
Health Canada: Proper Use and Disposal of Medication

Wordless Wednesday #8: View through the gap

For another one of my Wordless Wednesday photos, see my other blog. For other people's see wordlesswednesday.com.