Garbology

"Why are you reading that?" my husband asked.  "It's only going to upset you."

"No, I heard the author on NPR," I said.  "He made some great points and sounded really factual.  It'll be fine."

"I think you're crazy," my husband answered.

He had a point.  I've had more than one meltdown over green guilt in the 4 1/2 years that we've lived in the Bay Area, where going green sometimes feels like a competitive sport.  My anxiety about doing the right thing hit an extended high beginning in February 2010, when I discovered The Zero Waste Home by Bea Johnson.  Johnson's family of four produces about a quart of trash annually, and I tried to eat the elephant by jumping in where she was rather than where I am in the whole zero waste householding business.  It made me an exhausted, emotional, self-hating wreck.

I have since scaled back my efforts quite a lot, and our family of five now makes about one kitchen-sized bag of trash per week (but lots of recyclables).  I'm pleased with our progress, but before I determined what our next steps ought to be, I wanted to be better informed about what changes would have the greatest positive impact.   Which is why the NPR interview of Edward Humes, author of Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash caught my attention.

In the interview, Humes was talking about Bakelite, an early plastic that was used for billiard balls, piano keys, and telephones  -- things that were meant to be durable, and have long, even heirloom-length, lives. He was calm and reasoned, not casting blame but describing a shift in the way materials are used as being problematic.  It was impersonal, informative, and assumed intelligence from the audience.

Still feeling cautious, I downloaded a sample onto my Kindle.  Humes opens the book with an anecdote of elderly hoarders, Jesse & Thelma Gaston, who had been trapped in their own home, by their own trash, for three weeks.  He moves further into the story of trash by describing other hoarders, the condition of hoarding, and the media attention it has received in the last few years.  His punchline is startling:

But little if any thought is given to the refuse itself, or to the rather scarier question of how any person, hoarder or not, can possibly generate so much trash so quickly.

Of course, there's a reason for this blind spot: namely, the amount of junk, trash, and waste that hoarders generate is perfectly, horrifyingly normal.  It's just that most of us hoard it in landfills instead of living rooms, so we never see the truly epic quantities of stuff that we all discard.  But make no mistake: The two or three years it took the Gastons to fill their house with five to six tons of trash is typical for an American couple.  (page 3/location 106)

He follows this assertion with a discussion of how much trash the average American generates daily, coming up with an average lifetime production of 102 tons of trash.  There is a reasonably detailed discussion of how one estimates that amount, and multiple illustrations for how much 102 tons really is.    Aircraft carriers are involved.  Which is kind of scary, when you are talking about one person's trash.

Humes then poses three questions:  What is the nature and cost of that 102-ton monument of waste?  How is it possible for people to create so much waste without intending to do so, or even realize they are doing it? Is there a way back from the 102-ton legacy, and what would that do for us... or to us? (pages 11-12)  These three questions form the organizing principles of the book.

Part 1: The Biggest Thing We Make describes how America deals with trash, how it has been dealt with in the past, and some "paths not taken" in the history of American waste management.  He talks about the concept of waste and wastefulness, how our natural sense of thrift was overcome by early mid-century advertisers (fans of Mad Men might find this familiar territory), and how the political climate defeats promising policies.  The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is discussed in (rather depressing) detail.  Humes corrected my misconception, a common one, he asserts, that the Garbage Patch (not to mention the other gyres collecting plastic trash in the other oceans) is not an "island" of trash, but a chowder of plastic bits with floating detergent bottles and milk cartons and old toys floating around what ought to be a pristine blue surface thousands of miles from anywhere.

Part 2: The Trash Detectives was perhaps the most depressing section of the book.  It's the shortest, because it's the area involving the greatest number of unknowns.  It goes against what we might assume, that "someone out there" knows what happens to the cans we put in the recycling, or the printer cartridges that we drop off at Office Depot, but in fact there is not really a clear, readily followable chain for where stuff goes when we're done with it (except the landfill) as there is for how to get it into our hands.  Humes does a great job of detailing exactly what is and is not known about trash after its useful life, and although the information itself is depressing, his prose never is.  It's informative and occasionally incredulous, but always readable and factual; he is one of us, which is to say, he doesn't exempt himself from the problem.

Part 3: The Way Back was... maybe not so much empowering, given how thoroughly Humes detailed the scope of the problems our trash poses, but certainly hopeful.  "Pick of the Litter" details a San Francisco dump and artist-in-residence program that talks about how much is found in the dump, but also how much potential there is for the stuff in there as actual materials.  "Chico and the Man" recounts the efforts of a small entrepreneur to create a new kind of reusable shopping bag, and to educate people on the environmental benefits of avoiding plastic shopping bags -- and the gigantic lawsuit that was mounted against him by the plastic bag industry -- and how it was defeated.  The remainder of the section talks about the efforts communities around the world and one Marin County, California family of four (Bea Johnson's family) has been working to reduce their waste, one innovative idea at a time.

If you're interested in treading lightly on the Earth, this book will be interesting and informative.  If you've never thought about it before, it's a reasonable place to start; Humes makes a very good case for remaking ourselves into a less wasteful culture as being good for us personally, as well: with less stuff, and better stuff, we can do more, save more, be financially more secure and nationally more secure.  The materials we have in our landfills are resources we've paid for and then discarded as though they are valueless.  Humes makes a powerfully readable case for the value of our resources, and for renewing our natural tendency to thrift.

Laundry is My Emmamy

At the very end of 2009 the obligatory Facebook app made the rounds, summing up a year's worth of posts with cloud labels.  Coming off a high-low year that contrasted the demands of running a household with three children aged six and under with the incredible experience of training for and completing the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer 3 Day, I installed it.  I expected to relive all the satisfaction of the work I did for the 3 Day, something that reflected my hard work and success.  Which I did.

But the mentions of the laundry were a lot huger.

I'm going to backtrack a bit to a Cute Thing My Kids Said a couple of days ago.

Me, serving dinner: "Quentin, would you like any grape tomatoes?"

Quentin (age 4), looks up: "No." Looks back at his plate.  No expression.

Duncan (age 6), astounded: "But why not?  They're the most delicious things ever!"

Quentin, deadpan: "Vegetables are my emmamy."

Which is it, in one.  Laundry is my emmamy.

Now, I do try not to be Debbie Downer on Facebook.  So I use little euphemisms, like "I'm off to tackle Mount Washmore!" because it really was the most interesting thing going on in a day that is typically filled with various potty responsibilities and the making of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  Also, I think just lurking is sneaky and Facebook was, at that time, pretty much my only adult interaction for days on end.  On a really good day I might post "Mount Washmore is a molehill!" but by the next morning somebody would have wet the bed and I'd be in silent despair as I contemplated the loads of bedding to be dealt with.

I don't expect many men to have made it this far into the SAHM's lament, but just in case my husband's eyes haven't yet glazed over, and also to enumerate the pain of fellow laundry haters, I will spell out exactly why I loathe a job that is primarily done by two (mostly) automatic machines.

First is sheer volume.  In my household there are two adults, three children, and a cat.  Now, though I don't actually dress my cat, he does generate more than his share of laundry... if you get my drift.  He's old and not as spry as he used to be and, like the children in 2009, he doesn't always get there in time.  Which is fun.  I expect the rest of the family is self-explanatory, but what it all amounts to is that there is a lot of laundry and it's generally very disgusting, especially in 2009, when my children were 6, 3, and 1.

Second is my own idea of a job well-done.  Apparently there are a lot of ways to separate laundry (one friend divided them into "whites, reds or pinks, and everything else") and I use one of the more elaborate systems, involving not only color but fabric care. So nobody else is allowed to separate the laundry but me.

Third is the amount of time the machines take and the nature of parenting.  The washing machine takes just under an hour, but the dryer takes just over an hour.  This means that if I start the washer and the dryer at the same time, the washer will have to sit, completed, till the dryer finishes.  Except, if I put a load of line-dry only clothes in, I can squeeze two loads into the washer before I have to move the second one over to the dryer, so theoretically I get more done.  Except, when you are the only adult in the house reponsible for three children under six, inevitably there's going to be some reason to forget that you are supposed to go back and move everything over, and you certainly can't babysit the machines when you have to prevent the children from killing each other, or poisoning themselves, or when you have to fetch them from school or take them to baseball practice or... take your choice.  Children are distracting... as is Facebook.

Then there's the folding... the endless, monotonous folding.  It's not so bad when I can watch a lot of TV while I'm working at it, but I can't really watch TV while the children are around if I don't want their brains to rot in their heads and leak right out of their ears, so I inevitably end up taking 2 nights a week with a gargantuan mound of laundry next to me and watch something like 4 episodes of Star Trek Voyager until I get it all done.  Which is fine, I guess, although we are now a one-TV household and my husband really likes his xBox.

I won't talk about lugging it all around to the five rooms in the house where it is all stored.

Are you tired yet?

So in 2010, when my youngest son was 2 1/2 and we judged that my parents wouldn't hate us if they kept the three children while my husband and I took a long weekend to ourselves, we went to stay at a resort in Jamaica.  We went there to sit on the beach and just rest.  I exerted myself far enough to get a pedicure.  While I was at the salon, just me and the aesthetician, there was a terrible thunderstorm and the power went out.  She opened all the windows and we had enough light for her to keep working.  It was quiet, really, really quiet, and peaceful, and she was a very beautiful woman.  Not magazine beautiful, but character beautiful.  Someone you could really like.  And in that peaceful setting, with her working on my feet, we got to talking like women, sharing about our families (she had two teenage daughters) and how things were in Jamaica, which at that time was experiencing a lot of unrest in Kingstown, on the other end of the island.  (Now that I think about it, I don't know how or if or when that worked out, and I'm a little ashamed).

She said, "Three children, that's a lot of work."

And I, feeling rested and relaxed after two and a half days of enough sleep and nobody begging me for anything, said, "Yes, they are a lot of work.  But they're a lot of fun, too.  The laundry is the worst part."

She was surprised and we got to talking about laundry.  She never even thought of it as a chore, she said, because nobody has a washing machine, let alone a dryer, you just wash all your clothes in a tub, and it takes maybe ten or fifteen minutes.  You put it out on the line and a couple of hours later you bring it in and that's all there is to it.

So it got me wondering.  Has our labor-saving device turned what could be a short, quick job into something that requires hours of thought and effort?  If I did all my laundry in the bathtub instead of in a high efficiency front loader would I be able to make peace with that chore?

But then I look at Mount Washmore.  And I think of putting all that in a tub, and scrubbing it by hand, and hauling it out to the clothesline my neighborhood won't permit me to have, and how long it would take to dry in the San Francisco Bay Area fog belt even if I had one, and I think, not bloody likely.

So, laundry is, and shall remain, my emmamy.

Happy Birthday Queen Bess!

http://www.hoocher.com/Portraits_of_Elizabeth_I_of_England/Portraiture_of_Elizabeth_I_of_England.htm

Today is the 478th anniversary of the birth of Queen Elizabeth I of England -- the longest reigning, and, some say, the greatest of the Tudor monarchs.  I've often wished I could visit that time and place, if only for a moment.

Elizabeth Tudor had a very eventful life: the drama of her parents' long, stormy courtship and its emphatic end, when her father Henry VIII beheaded her mother, Anne Boleyn, was only a preview for the tempestuous life their daughter would lead.  Elizabeth was the culmination of her father's dearest wish, and the bane of his experience of fatherhood; she was disinherited and reinstated and her ascension to the throne in 1558 was in doubt almost to the moment it occurred.  She had many suitors, but only one love of her life, a married man who became even more unavailable with the death of his wife than he had been before her mysterious fall down a flight of stairs.  She was a womanly woman who used her femininity to control the men who surrounded her, but donned armor and referred to herself as a Prince when they needed to be reminded who was in charge.  Her fits of rage were as famous to those who served her as the fits of tears she indulged in when making a difficult decision, as when she authorized the execution of her cousin and fellow queen, Mary Stuart.  She was as vivid as her red hair and as hard to pin down as a length of silk.

Shaping my life

OK, so the exercise comes from Pen on Fire by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett.

Think about what you wish for, and imagine how you'd like your life to be in six months, a year, five years from now.  Your age doesn't matter here, especially if you think that you should already have realized your dream or that you're too young to see your dream come tue for a good many years.  Focus on the dream itself.  Envision your future as you'd like to live it.  ... Write about that, down to the type flooring... and teh type of chair you'll sit on.  

Now set your timer for fifteen minutes and write down your ideal scenario.  Be specific: How will yo uspend your days? Do you see yourself writing full-time? What will you write -- stories, articles, essays, poems, novels? Don't skimp on details.

So I'm totally petrified.  This writing business is scary to me.  I feel like I am sending wishes into nowhere, and that I'm wasting my time -- this was never considered a great way to spend my time.  But I also feel like if I don't start soon I'm going to regret it, and people are going to get really tired of me holding forth just for the sound of my own voice.

So what I want is to establish a certain seriousness for myself in which I actually make scheduled time to write each day.  I'd like to treat my projects with professionalism and dedication, the way Nicole Cabrera is demonstrating on her Facebook page.  I'd like to write with purpose at least a little bit every day.  I want to create a whole project, outline, planning, and all, taking the craft and construction of my fiction seriously, and put it all together with a fluency and creativity and originality that is just mine.  Then I want to send it into the world.

I want to call myself a writer in public and have some evidence that I'm not just slapping a fancy name on my haphazard, on-call life.  I want my office to be neat and my table clear so that I can focus.  (Four minutes down and I'm feeling very, very visible.  This is terrifying.  I am so exposed). 

What else do I want?  Just some empty space every day or every other day to sit down and write without my stuff getting disturbed.  What do I want to write?  MOstly fiction, but I would like to write a few articles or something that could be published in a shorter span of time, partlly for the exercise of getting things down on paper, but also for the... what's that word... legitimizing effect that being in print would give me.  And I want that legitimizing effect for myself, to reinforce my sense that I am entitled to do this work, and that it is worthy and not selfish, and because I want to be in that Great Conversation that I've been listening to for all these years.

I want to write Middlemarch, is what I want to do. 

I'm not totally sure I realized that that is what I'm aiming for, but now that I admit it, it feels true.  I love the craftedness of Middlemarch, the control that Eliot had to have over her characters and her story to get it all to come out right in the end.  I love how richly she made it sound like she actually knew what she was talking about (but what do I know I live 130 years later).  I am worried that I don't know so much, and that I don't know so many different kinds of people living so many different ways... but then again I think I do sort of have access to that, perhaps not to the extent offered by the cultures in the United States, but perhaps to the extent that Eliot experienced diversity. 

And perhaps I'm selling myself short.  I mean, my project that I've been chewing on about the forum certainly has the potential to do that, even if I'm thinking of it more as an Olive Kitteredge project.  (Nine minutes down and I"m feeling a little better, although this journaling business reminds me uncomfortably of high school and college blathering).  In fact I think there is somewhat more diversity represented on the Forum than I know what to do with, and I don't have any sense of what kind of tone I want to nail down (but a person can work through that, duh) and I'm worried that "The Public" will call me out for being an assuming ignoramus or worse if I try to capture this.  But after all what I want to capture isn't so much a way of life as one way of seeing a certain set of consequences.  And my own point of view is the only one that matters, since if I were lucky enough to publish this it would be my name on the cover.

Which brings me to:  Do I even want my name on the cover?  Would I still be welcome at all our family homes if I publish the way I want to and the way I ought to?  But I'm getting ahead of myself... First I have to write.

Which brings me back to the original question.  What do I want my life to look like in six months?  Well, pretty much how it does now, except that I take an hour or two every day to get words on the paper, and that they are put on that paper with purpose, not just as the Dear Diary blathering of a bored stay at home mom.  Which I don't think I really am.  The purpose of all this is to go from being a stay at home mom to a work at home mom, and ultimately to have an actual career that requires of me some of what I have that hasn't been used so much lately.  (Fourteen minutes; now for the big finish!)

OK, well, today was the first day of the next six months, and let's just see how I do.  Hello, cruel world.

Write about "what goes without saying"

What goes without saying... that could go two ways.  I suppose that the Writer's Book of Days intends me to write about our unspoken assumptions.  But perhaps in the age of the blogosphere, to reference the media's current obsessively used term, it is more pertinent to consider what goes unsaid.  The stories that we tell only partially.

How does one approach a story in which only a certain set of facts pertinent to one facet of a vast situation are shared?  And then the reaction that counters it, both from strangers interacting.  It should be fictionalized and related that way.  But it would be a tremendously complex presentation.  Oh...  Do people approach that sort of a relationship with honest goodwill, or prurient interest?  There is a story there.

Two threads right now are especially interesting: one is the discussion about SAHMs on one income, and how here especially (meaning in Southern Marin) there is a specific sense of how much is enough that seems out of sync with other parts of the country.  The other thread is a discussion of how much fathers participate in children's lives and activities, what help mothers expect and get from their partners, and how families see others who function differently.  There is a story in these threads, but how do you write it?  Hmmm...

What goes without saying is that when one woman says "My husband doesn't help or engage at all but I love him anyway even though he makes me cry every day" and then another says "How can you love that inconsiderate, uncaring, hurtful boor?" there is a gap of information between those two women.  What does the first woman's husband do to preserve her love for him?  What does the other woman's husband do differently?  What gives her the right to call the first woman's husband and feelings for him out like that?  What is she covering up in her own family that she feels the need to speak up that way?  This is meaty.

So three days in and I may have found a story.  Seems a little easy... perhaps I have some slight ability here?  And then how do I figure out how to make the time for it?  Like Nicole Cabrera, I suppose, I have to schedule it and not be available for anything else then.  There is a lot to sort out, and I'm new at these things.  Hmmm... something to think about. 

Write about small scrapes and bruises

Quentin fell flat on his face this afternoon at the church lunch.  He scraped up both knees and a bit of his chin.  He fell and the witnesses all gasped and said, Oh no.  His daddy and I said cheerily, You're all right!  Good fall!  He pulled himself up and looked around.  No tears, but his bottom lip started puffing out and he walked straight over to the nearest parent to be picked up and snuggled.  He nestles right in, never crying, just getting his comfort, and maybe shaking a bit.

The thing is, we love it when he falls like that.  We feel so comforted ourselves when our youngest child nestles in after a fall.  It is almost mean, how we call out to him, Good fall! and then silently compete to be the one into whose arms he runs.  Even watching him give that love to someone else isn't so bad, if you know that you are going to get your turn sometime soon.

Our other children are not nearly so calm and so trusting.  When they fall, they cry.  They ask for cold packs and bandaids and for us to make it better.  We feel taxed by their little scrapes and bruises, rather than healed by them.  When Quentin falls even Charlotte reaches her arms open, and if she's closest then she gets that good snuggle; his comfort is not Mommy or Daddy-centric.  If Duncan falls, Charlotte might offer him a bandaid or get the cold pack, but she isn't rushing to give him his hug and he certainly isn't running to the closest person with arms stretched wide.

What does this say about Quentin, about our willingness to let him fall for the privilege of comforting him, for the lie we tell when we say we are giving him comfort rather than receiving unconditional love from him?  I do not know.  It will be interesting to see if that quality survives, and if it doesn't what kills it.  It will be interesting to see if I can even tell when his trust turns to wariness, or if we are slowly killing it by our greed for his snuggles. 

There is a place called...

Prompt from: A Writer's Book of Days

There is a place called home. Some people live there all their lives; others spend all their lives searching for it. I am one of those.

There are tricks that people like me use to pretend we've found home. We call it by the name of a person. We call it a season, a state of mind, the arrangement of a room. These are tricks.

I am not totally sure, however, that even the lucky ones who know where home is really feel at home there. (And here, three minutes in my courage begins to fail). I think there are many people who know that they are home in a town, or a particular building, and still feel at odds at it. Perhaps they are even more unlucky than those of us who feel a hole in our beings; they know where home is, and they do not feel at home there, and they spend their lives pretending they are home when they can't call it home any more than we homeless souls can.

So what is home? What is it? There is an idea that home is the place where you can rest. Someone once said that home is where they have to take you in. Neither of those is useful. I can rest here in my own house, where I can shut out the town that bothers me so much and create my own little reality. But it doesn't serve, and I'm not sure that the building itself is what interferes with my idea of home, or my own messiness (and therefore my own self that prevents me ever being at home), or the fact that I live with other people who sometimes tire me with their difference from myself. Why do I not feel home when I am at home? And do my children feel this way?

When I imagine my ideal living situation, I always leave California for the East Coast. I return to Atlanta, though even in my imaginings it is not the ideal place, the place where I would go if I could choose anywhere in the world. If I let myself dream all the way, I would go back to Falls Church, where my happiness was complete and incomplete at the same time, but which I miss as one misses a lover that didn't quite happen. I do not understand this.

My image of what the building of my home would be also varies. Sometimes it is one of the big, spacious, gracious homes of suburban Atlanta, and I really, honestly would like to live in one of those; at the same time, it sometimes is a cozy little cottage, just for me. Sometimes it is dark, and formal, and contemporary, colored autumn, and in my sweet little cottage it is whites and yellows and cheerful greens with little splashes of coral or orange or teal.

There is no doubt, in this house, which is neither spacious nor gracious nor cozy and cottage-y, that I am generally in the way of my own feeling of home. I want to be in a delightfully spare, neat house, and I inevitably leave clutter on every flat surface and then fail to tidy up effectively. I love having a cat, but I hate his mess and habits, and that makes me treat him as though I don't love him. Of course there is a cat in my imaginary cottage, but if Turbo doesn't make it the cottage will always only have an imaginary cat.

I think I am lost. I am happy to see the end of the fifteen minutes that I allotted to this exercise, but I think it may perhaps be the beginning of my getting in the way of my own happiness. I hope that is the case; I am at the end of my ability to withstand my own blockheadedness.