Things I’ve thought about this Week

I’ve thought about writing about several things this week, but didn’t have enough to say about any of them to warrant their own post. So here they are in a convenient “listicle”:

• As if people needed more forums on the internets to whine, there is a site called angryjournalist.com. Sometimes though, they make a point…the best I saw: “If you got a journalism degree, you probably don’t even know how to spell obituary nevermind write one.”

• Speaking of spelling, to know me is to know my spelling anxieties, and my creative methods of getting around my dyslexic shortcomings (i.e. looking up synonyms of words I want to use in order to find how to spell them because even spell-check doesn’t know what I’m trying to say.) Truly, my poor spelling is one of the things I am most self-conscious about. Imagine then my horror last Saturday night when I was forced on stage during 30 plays in 60 minutes to participate in a Spelling Bee! I lost of course. And was told “ You have to decide if losing this means that you are a loser for this moment, or if you will be a loser for life.” How about a little from A and a little from B?

• I have found pretty much everyone to be mildly to highly annoying in recent weeks. Top honors to these “anti-sprawl arsonists/activists” though, way take a worthy cause (anti-sprawl and environmentalism) and get it completely f-ing wrong. Burning “green” houses to make a point about conservation? Well done.

• I am completely over Obama-fever. In fact, I am over the presidential primaries all together, they reached the oversaturation point a month or two ago, yet still managed to hold my attention. Until now. Seriously, I don’t care if Bill and Hillary took a walk in the park or if Obama is now using the word “transformative” instead of “change”. I’m just over it. For now. At this point, I’m voting for Nader. Also, wil.i.am? The first video was cheesy, but sure, inspiring. The second video? the chanting is kind of creepy, and um, really why don’t you just sleep with him and get it over with already, he’s going to need a restraining order if you keep up this kind of fawning.

• Despite myself, I don’t hate Ellen Page as much anymore. I watched Hard Candy last weekend and was quite impressed with her performance. I think that maybe all the hype about her in Juno was because people wished they made bigger deal out of her in Hard Candy, but torturing a pedophile isn’t as mass market friendly as an emotionally unconvincing poorly written pregnant high schooler. Plus she made fun of the lame Juno dialog during her SNL monologue, and for that I am grateful.


• And finally, this week I’ve been mildly obsessed with Songza

Young at Heart....

Family is by nature troubling. You love them, and they love you, if you're lucky, but a whole different set of rules apply as far as conversation goes. Like for instance, what do you say to your grandmother, whom has always voted democratic, when she tells you that she is favoring Mitt robotic muppet Romney? It's a delicate balance. She's the sweetest old woman in the world. You tell her calmly why you are not so fond of him. Other times though you just bite your tongue.

After all your views about almost everything are slightly to drastically different than the rest of your family. And your brother has been calling you a hippie ever since you stopped eating meat and started wearing combat boots with dresses in 1994 (even if you have long since developed a much better fashion sense).

It's not just politics and world views that my family and I disagree on, it's mostly, their image of me. You see, I am currently 26-years-old, yet to some members of my family, my age and perceived social development never made it past 1994. Like today when in the same conversation with my grandmother, I told her about how I am mentoring a 13-year-old, and how at first I was worried that I might be too young to mentor a teenager, until I realized that I am twice her age, and having a mentor in her 20s, would probably be beneficial to her. My grandma said, "well, you aren't the far apart in age from a teenager mentally."

Ouch.
I told my mom about it later. She brushed it off, "she probably meant young at heart."

Young at heart.........mentally.
(above Angela Chase circa 1994, whom I used to dress like)

Give me a Freegan Break

This doesn’t annoy me nearly as much as the showy no toilet paper yuppies and certainly not as much as the backwards thinking involved with these products. In fact I must admit that for the most part I agree with these hippies.

Of course not without exception: dumpster diving and trash picking is something poor people have been doing, well, probably since there has been rich people to throw out perfectly good stuff. Buying things at garage sales and taking them off the street is just ingrained as good sense in people without money. Truly, the lower your income, the more resourceful you have to be.

New York City is probably one of the worst places in America to be poor, yet one of the best places to find almost anything for free. And while I don’t begrudge these white people from middle and upper class backgrounds taking things from the trash (it’s public domain after all, it should be equal opportunity), I do take offense that they have co-opted it as their idea.

Only when people who retired early from investment banking start realizing that there’s a lot of waste and a lot of nice stuff in there does it become a news item (they probably came to this realization by remembering how much nice stuff they once chucked themselves). Producing less waste, consuming less, reusing more, all of these are necessary and their ideas and actions are in the right place, it’s the self-important “revolutionary” approach that is annoying.

Poor people might not pick trash to save the environment, but their impact (or lack of impact) on the environment is probably considerably more over their lifetimes since they buy less in the first place, have smaller homes, cars, etc. The New York Times however, isn’t likely to print an article about poor people picking trash, as it wouldn’t be as self-congratulatory to it’s perceived readership.


Side Note: A vegan eating meat so it doesn’t go to waste rubs me the wrong way; it seems like morals that are a bit too flexible. (Couldn’t they just give the meat to a meat-eating homeless person?)

Paper or plastic

Oh Brooklyn politicians! Sometimes you can be so misguided, and sometimes you seem to get the idea.

It may seem like an odd issue to get enthusiastically behind, but it is the political issue that I've been must active and interested in, in the last few months. Sure, it's not the most important or pressing issue, but I think why I am so behind it is that it's something that is practical and beneficial and easy for people of any city or social standing to do. It's activism that doesn't feel like activism, so people might actually do it. It's putting something in your shoulder bag or old lady cart instead of the 20 plastic bags per item C-town seems to think you need. And the impact on the environment, animals, and oil dependency can be immediate and tangible.

I guess what it comes down to is that I used to be really idealistic, but more and more I am a grumpy old lady and don't have much faith in people to do the right thing. This is something I can actually see happening. Baby steps and all that.

Side note: When I searched for a picture of a plastic bag, and I got the above as a result. The photo was linked (perhaps unsurprisingly) to a California Green party website with a story about how last month San Francisco was the first city in the US to ban plastic bags. See those hippies have good ideas sometimes.