Recycling, but it’s never that simple

It surprises me that there are still people who are surprised that plastic recycling is, well, a joke, and always has been. I know it is, not because I’m psychic or because I’ve been digging through secret industrial reports, but because I’ve been reading things on websites and in books that have been widely available to everybody.

Well, so we’re clear – plastic recycling is a joke. This story from Planet Money does an excellent job explaining why, as well as the history of how it came to be seen as, well, not a joke.

Glass recycling is a little better in that the odds that your container will be recycled are greater than one out of two, but not bymuch. (Hint: glass breaks.) The best things to recycle are aluminum, because that doesn’t break as much, and it makes more financial sense for the metal to be melted down and reused. So recycle your cans with confidence.

I really want to say something here about how the best thing to do is to not buy packaged goods at all, and that’s the best thing for the planet. And it’s true. But I can’t help thinking about that single parent working a couple of jobs so they can hurriedly feed their children, and it’s hard for me to lecture them about buying cereal (with a coated cardboard box and plastic liner) or frozen dinners they can heat up. I’m really also not in the mood to entertain lectures on behalf of those parents about how they can batch cook on the weekends, in part because I know how easily children who are hyperaware of how many options they don’t have don’t like to have what few choices they have about food made for them a few days in advance.

So here’s a compromise: everyone who can should avoid packaging, and those of us with resources to spare (in this case, time) should lobby our federal representatives and senators to make laws forbidding the use of plastic packaging – and raising both the minimum wage and guaranteed benefits for all parents.

Learning Circles

I spent some months in lockdown working on a learning circle with a friend. I really love this model, and I think of it as something John Holt would have approved of if he could have seen what possibilities tech would open up for us in the 21^st century.

My friend Jordan designed classes on writing almost from scratch; there’s plenty of linked material, but the structure and flow are all original. I love this, in part because it’s more of a guarantee that the work will remain free. (A number of places that used to offer free massive open online courses have started to charge for content.) I’m not going to belabor the obvious, but that’s hugely important for people, especially when so many are out of work, or their work is a “gig” that offers no guarantees of benefits or even continued employment.

The learning circle we worked on is on self-care, and as long as no monkey wrenches get thrown at us in the next few months, we’ll be piloting the course in May. (Yes, of course on Zoom.) I’m really excited about this, in part because I had a lot of fun researching, writing, and editing with my friend, and in part because it’s a really important topic. We live in a culture that does not prioritize taking care of ourselves; I’ll leave it to you to decide how long that’s been the case. It’s one thing to not always give ourselves the kind of food we need or as much exercise as we’ve been advised to take, but we don’t even get the amount of sleep we’re supposed to. An increasing number of us not only live with toxic levels of stress, we’re made to feel as if we should take on more. That’s bs, and again, I’ll leave it to you to determine when that started, and for whom.

It’s a cultural problem, but the only way I know how to change a culture is to start with people. I can’t promise that your job will get less toxic once you start thinking about self-care, but I can tell you that once you start thinking about the importance of your own needs, you’ve got a better chance of using the magic word “no” more often.

That’s the first course, and I’m excited. And that’s just the first in the list I have planned. I’ll be working on one – probably around the summer, but maybe the fall – on climate change and soil/agriculture, one on financial literacy, and maybe ones for media literacy and creativity (gulp). We’ll see, but expect to see a bunch from me in 2022.

Climate Change

Should I entitle this Climate Change 1, or put a date after it? Because it’s not like I’m only going to write about it once.

It’s not that I’m a pessimist or an optimist. Most people don’t fall into neat categories like that, just like most of us aren’t strictly introverts or extroverts. We’re pretty fluid, we human beings. But I do feel good about labeling myself a survivor, as in, I want to keep living and won’t go into a corner and wait for disaster to find me.

It would be a mistake to say I was thrilled when Biden was elected. I voted for him, knowing how warty his record was (sorry, Julian Castro and Andrew Yang were both out of the race by the time it was Massachusetts’ turn to vote in the primaries), but as unstable as Trump was, I didn’t want to celebrate until Biden was inaugurated. And then after the insurrection on January 6, I didn’t want to stop holding my breath until I was sure we would get through the entire day without incident.

We did, and I’m immeasurably thankful for that. One of the only credits I’ll give to Trump is that he made us grateful now for normalcy – and by normalcy, I mean things working according to the law. And as a climate activist, I feel a little more hopeful than I would have if Trump had been re-elected. To say it’s easier to work against climate change at the federal level now is such an understatement, it’s almost snide.

So why only a little more hopeful? Because if Biden hadn’t won, there were still things we could do at the state and municipal levels. We know states can limit what can be sold in their borders (hello, California), but cities and towns can also limit who’s allowed to have a permit to run a business in their cities, and can control what goes into the waste stream. It’s a hell of a lot easier when there’s coordination at the federal level, but it’s not impossible, and if Trump had been re-elected, it would have been imperative.

Who am I kidding? It’s still imperative, and the states need to stop trying to prove their fealty to, what, coal and oil, two industries that are dying already, or biomass, one of the most inefficient and damaging energy “solutions”, and start thinking about how they can augment federal regulations, not stimy them. I read recently that we’ve lost ice in the last few decades that was the equivalent of the size of the entire UK, and the melting of said ice has an added an inch to the level of sea water around the world.

How about this? If I do choose to go into a corner and die, it won’t be so I can drown. Keep at it, because life as we know it doesn’t end unless we let it.

Cookbooks are lifestyle guides

 I think I already said this before, but it’s still true.

And to be clear, there’s a point in many people’s lives where those are necessary. If you’re a young adult and you weren’t taught how to cook, cookbooks can be, if not a lifesaver, a big money saver. Or maybe you’re someone who’d really like to try a different kind of cuisine – Indian, Korean, Greek – and you’ve never cooked anything like it. Then, yes, cookbooks can be a big help, many times even more so than videos.

But these conditions do not apply to me anymore, and what I’ve found in the many cookbooks I’ve read over the last three decades (and more – I read cookbooks at a very early age) is that while there is much instruction, there is also a good bit of food writing, and more than a fair share of “this is how you do it properly.” Think Martha Stewart, but also, in her own way, think Nigella Lawson. Really, all of them. In the last few years I started to feel like cookbooks were putting me in a straight jacket, not showing me new opportunities. I think what finally set me off was an author – someone who was writing in his thirties – admonishing me about how to cook beans, as if those were the most difficult things in the world to cook and if I didn’t do it just so they pretty much wouldn’t be worth eating.

I think I’ve reached the point in my life where I’m tired of people talking to me like that about anything, which makes it hard to read a lot of blogs, but that’s another story.

Before the tidying a few days ago, I went through my collection of cookbooks and got rid of over half of them. I would have gotten rid of more, but my husband has sentimental attachments to six of them, one I received as a gift from my sister (the author was a next door neighbor), and another is a book I use very frequently (forgive me for not having already internalized how to make kimchi). That feels right. I also copied, over the course of a few years, recipes into a beautiful notebook my oldest daughter bought me as a present several years ago. Oh right – I also already know how to cook.

And speaking of blogs: around the time of the bookshelf tidying I also tidied my blog reader. I have one blog about food justice and one blog about foraging, and that’s it for anything related to food. Thank goodness I already got rid of Instagram, because otherwise there would be no escape, from food or lifestyle guidance.

Pause

If my last post sounds a little bitter, it’s because I came to the realization a few days ago that I needed to pause the writing project I’ve been working on since 2017 so I can accomplish the project I’m referring to. Sorry, I could of course do both, but it’s become evident to me that if I don’t want to have any more episodes like the one I did on December 30, I need to take pressure off of myself.

Bitterness comes from thinking about the pages I’ve already lost.

Full disclosure: there is one more project I have to work on during this time. My sons are nearing the end of their homeschooling career, and it’s time to move them on. We’re focusing on finishing up math, getting them ready for assessments, and working on their transcripts. This is non-negotiable. It’s not hours of work every day – well, not too many hours – but it’s work that needs to be done just about every day. I can do two things pretty well, but I can’t do three.

I picture myself, the last few days of April, and certainly the first week of May, writing furiously to give voice to the characters who have pounding on the walls of my subconscious to get out, and I picture my sons feeling confident about what the months after will bring for them.

The difference between a fantasy and a plan is the work we put into it.

Does Not Play Well With Others

I do not. But one of the benefits of maturity is that I don’t feel bad about that anymore.

In the final analysis, I’m just a little too ruthless to work with almost everyone else. Someone says something about a deadline, someone says something about an objective, and I start doing this thing most other people find weird: planning. But, it turns out, other people like to talk more and explore options. Which is fine, except that people seem to want to do more of that as that deadline approaches and more planning still needs to be done. And I suspect that much of the world is utterly sanguine about that, but it fills me with panic about last minute adjustments and having to put off the rest of my life in order to make something work.

Well, as of May, I’m done with all of that.

I do a little visualization exercise in the mornings, and I realized a few days ago that I put myself in group settings where I haven’t felt comfortable before. This may be my fantasy – visualizations are sometimes just that – that I’ll be able to feel like I belong in those places, but lately I don’t like that fantasy. I’m now starting to picture myself alone in settings where I’ve enjoyed myself, or with people I know I feel good with (aka family and friends). And that feels like something I can make a reality.

Qigong

 My heart started bothering me again on December 30, 2020. I don’t usually put down dates like that, but I remember it very well because it was the day before NYE and I was visiting one of my daughters at work with my husband and sons. Too much excitement? Maybe. I don’t know, but it did seem clear to me that day, and when I was exhausted after the next episode, that all of the workout plans I’d been pursuing were out the door for the next few months. (This is part of what I mean about trying on new personalities, or in this case trying to fit back into old ones.)

So I’ve been doing something I wanted to anyway and have been focusing on walking and qigong. (Yes, I’m also drinking tea maybe once a week, and coffee never; that last part isn’t hard at all.) I love walking, and since reading The Nature Fix I’ve been trying to expose myself to as much green as I can; I’m fortunate to live in a part of Boston where that’s easy.

As much as I dabbled into qigong before, I found I really loved Lee Holden’s approach, and after using his practices on Hoopla A LOT, I treated myself and bought four of his dvds. (I’m old-fashioned, I know; I like to be able to use things that don’t depend on whether I have a good wi-fi connection.) And I’m using them regularly (well, three of them; the fourth feels a little too light). And I love it. It focuses my breathing, goes at the right pace to allow me to move into a flow, and I break a little bit of a sweat. It’s not magic – I don’t always emerge from a practice feeling all of my troubles fall away – but it does make me feel better without making me feel worse. (People who work out regularly may know what I mean.)

The big question: do I get another DVD?