Buying Cat Litter in a Cardboard Box

This morning, I cut open a plastic package containing tortellini. I emptied the pasta into the pot of boiling water and dumped the packaging into the trash. Already, there was a plastic wrapper from a package of bacon, a large plastic container that had held four days worth of spinach, and a plug from my carton of milk.

I stood and stared at my garbage for a moment. It was 6:17 am.

"So much plastic," I said.

"Yeah," said Mike, "and most of them could package this stuff in plastic made of cellulose, stuff that would eventually break down in the landfills."

"Shit, we throw away enough to kill an animal every day."

"Cellulose, I'm telling you. It's the future."

Where are you food producers? Organic Girl? Are you in?

What about you Buttoni? We eat your tortellini twice a week. That's the weekly lives of two birds or a big fish. Can you make the switch?

Nutribiotic? Can you be a harbinger for a brighter future by switching to a more sustainable packaging?

I can't exactly boycott plastic altogether, but I'm trying. I'd really hate to lose my Organic Girl greens, but I'm already buying loose bunches of romaine lettuce more often. See, there's one thing I can do, buy less plastic.

I already buy Arm and Hammer Fragrance Free Cat Litter because it works well and it comes in a sturdy cardboard box that I can recycle every week! Go Arm and Hammer!

Thank you for listening, jules

Aliens May Be Watching Us Burn Ourselves Up

Do you remember your New Year's resolution this year?

Tell me the first feeling you had when you thought about what it was. It was failure, right? You got a heavy feeling in your gut and you felt ashamed to open your mouth. You wished you hadn't told anyone about it at all. You wished you hadn't even made a New Year's resolution.

If that's not you, then great. Now, I feel even worse. You've lost ten pounds. You're exercising every other day without fail. You're eating healthier than you ever have. You feel great. You can wear clothes that haven't fit you in ten years.

Great. Just great.

Not me. Well, I have been eating better than ever, but I'm still not losing weight. It's not fair how a body conserves more energy every single time it goes without during a diet. Fat people aren't sloppy over-eaters. They're people who have tried the hardest and  whose bodies have gone all war-mode rationing and using every single calorie to the greatest extent so they won't starve to death. Isn't that ironic? That fat people are the ones whose bodies think they are starving. Fuck.

Of course, I can't find that article now written by a nutrition expert at Johns Hopkins. You're going to think I'm just a fat person who made the whole thing up as an excuse. Fine. Think what you want. Diets don't work. They just don't. That's what I believe and I'm sticking to it. You can believe what you want, especially if you're a skinny-mini who has never struggled with more than four pounds from your so-called optimum weight.

Some of us haven't had it as easy as you.

I really meant to talk about my New Year's resolution today. I didn't resolve to lose weight. I won't. Not ever.

Mine was to look at my own carbon footprint and see what ways I could shrink it further, to educate myself about what is happening due to climate change, and to encourage the world to "science the shit out of that problem." Thank you Andy Weir. I love that line from The Martian.

I may not have posted in a long time. I started a new job and it required my whole brain for a while. Then, I got a cold and that saturated my whole brain for a while. And  then I felt absolute certainty that we're all going to die when the climate changes and the only animals that are going to survive are jellyfish, rats, and roaches. And hopelessness weighed my brain down and it sat at the bottom of the Mariana Trench for a while where scientists have discovered that sea life there also has plastic in their guts.

Great. Just great. We're all going to die.

Eventually, a new species will reach the pinnacle of the food chain. I imagine intelligent aliens that might have been wondering about contacting us to warn us about other aliens that might come to Earth to kill us and consume all our resources. If we can't get onboard with sustainability, they won't even bother since we're killing ourselves just as efficiently on our own. Hopefully, they'll come to Earth anyway and quietly collect some monarch butterflies, the white rhino, and some of the undiscovered fungi in the Amazon that cures cancer and heart disease before it goes extinct along with all of humanity. Maybe they'll 'harvest' a few humans for their collection and plant them on a planet that could harbor our forms of life. Maybe we are an experiment in a huge laboratory. Maybe we're an exhibit in a zoo.

Okay, I'm back. It's hard to think big. It really is. There are so many possibilities I hadn't thought of, that I don't know.

But let's look at the ozone layer. The hole in the ozone is getting smaller. Did I already tell you that? I think I did. It is a tiny ray of hope for humanity. We had a problem and together, we solved it.

So, if we can beat that problem as a population, can we also work science magic on climate change as well.

The problem with my New Year's resolution is that there is no way for me to get a satisfactory outcome using a model of an independent individual acting on her own. This is a global fucking problem so there isn't going to be a single intelligent cowboy played by Bruce Willis or Brad Pitt who can solve it for us and bring Earth back to a balance that we had before the industrial revolution. (Notice that the hero is suddenly a white male in the movie. I hate when that happens. Somebody told me recently that it was a woman, Rosalind Franklin, who discovered the structure of DNA and not Watson and Crick. So maybe Sandra Bullock should save the world from climate change. What do you think?)

Climate change is something that must be achieved, not even as a nation, but as the whole of humanity working together. Humanity need to liberally fund climate change research so someone finds a way. Maybe multiple scientists can find multiple ways. Humanity needs to pull together to do what is recommended, even if it feels like we're rationing rubber for tires, sugar, and gas like our grandparents did during WW II.

You know that new movie that's coming out today, Pacific Rim? In that story, everyone in the world unites to defeat the aliens? You know how people in the movie Independence Day suddenly lost all their desire for war and started working together using their intelligence to outwit the aliens bent on genocide? That.

We need to think that way. We. All of us. Almost all countries in the world except for us have ratified the Paris Climate Agreement. Trump has no concern for our future. You can see that with the pipelines and the drilling in the Arctic circle and the reduction in National Park lands. The other country that held out for a while, Syria, joined not long ago. We're the only one that's staying out. What idiots. There are a few countries that have yet to ratify it. Did you know that technically, we're still in the Paris Climate Agreement since the first time we can withdraw is just after the 2020 election. That's cool.

At least, as a whole, humanity believes a tsunami of problems are happening regarding our climate. We  recognize it. It's a start.

But will we motivate ourselves as individuals fast enough to make global changes soon enough?

I'm seeing a whole lot of inertia, even in myself.

Thank you for listening, jules