We're Fu@%ed. I'm single. Carry on.

This I didn't expect.

After months of meandering down lonely emotional passages, bumping into walls and making frequent u-turns, I finally inched up on certainty. Things with HCB weren't working. They hadn't for a long time. We both knew it. We talked about it. We couldn't fix it.

We had the hard conversations.
And then I left town.

It was supposed to be a father-daughter pilgrimage to my birthplace in South America, a relaxing beach vacation with some sweet familial significance. I relished the chance to set aside months/years/a lifetime of relentless analysis in favor of ripest mangoes, 80 degree weather and my thighs getting reacquainted with sunshine. I needed some time to just feel.

It was everything I hoped. But it was also a total slap in the face.

This is what I saw. This is what I know: we are fucked.

No amount of local organic kumquats or making our own oatmeal scrub or tracing our denim purchases or abstaining from free printers is going to stem the tide of developing nations. There are BILLIONS of people out there who can finally afford their Starbucks, and no one - particularly not our collective fat ass - is going to tell them they can't have it. I saw just a tiny piece. Lima has 8.5 million people (30% of Peru's population), the average age of whom is 25. They have endured years of political corruption, turmoil and terrorism. Their city is finally, blissfully, emerging as a hub of culture and industry. Their economy is strong. The cars are shiny and new. The grocery stores cover a city block and stock everything imaginable. Hip restaurants (some of them chains) teem with attractive young people laughing and cavorting. New condos are blanketing the city like kudzu.

It's awesome.

Lima is alive in a way that San Francisco hasn't been for a long time. Prosperity, relative though it may be for the majority of the population, is busy breeding joy. And creativity. And passion. All the things that make life worth living. The energy is palpable and infectious.

If you saw it, you'd be happy for them. The Limeñas. The kids in Beijing. The hipsters in Mumbai. Whether or not the planet can sustain it (it can't), the American lifestyle we've dreamed up is pretty sweet. Yes, potentially absurd and meaningless in excess, but utterly safe and incredibly comfortable. We should know; we can't seem to quit it, either. And we're still exporting it. WalMart is building 15 locations in Peru next year.

So barring a global pandemic that knocks off a healthy chunk of the population (swine flu, anyone??), considerable and coordinated political will (fat chance), and/or several technological breakthroughs that sweep in to save our collective fat ass, we're fucked.

We cannot stem this tide.

You and I have forty years left. How do you want to spend them?

That's the question I've been asking myself for the last two months. I apologize for the absence; I was trying to decide what to tell you. As you can imagine, this new awareness makes the act of painstakingly itemizing the contents of my life feel pretty naive/myopic/just plain stupid. My peeps were the first to hear this rant, and more than a few of them were dismayed. What do you do when your most annoyingly smug Eco Nerd friend suddenly sounds as if she's giving up the cause? Rejoice that she'll finally stop berating you for using bleach, or panic that even the optimists are being taken down by the ineluctable truth?

I scarcely know what to do myself. HCB and I have officially split, so I've spent the last month finding and decorating a new apartment. Without itemization or apology. I have the local Ikea showroom memorized. A year ago this fact would have given me hives. Now only the bill does.

I'm trying to reframe, to make sense...

So far I have only a half-notion, a loaf of bread on first rise. I DO know that we should NOT give up conscious consumerism. Of course not. As Michael says, "Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can't prove that it will." But I do think a shift is in order.

It has something to do with resilience rather than sustainability. Humanitarianism rather than environmentalism.

Ultimately, all we have - all we've ever had - is units of time and energy. It's just that now we can see the end of them. Seems to me we should spend what we have left seeking joy. For as many people as possible. Not the kind you can buy necessarily (though humans have a long history of treasured possessions), but the kind that comes from feeling truly safe. Safe from violence, from illness, from hunger, from poverty. Safe to love your partner freely, provide for your family, break bread with your neighbor, feel the sun on your thighs and taste ripe mango on your tongue. We should all have that chance.

Crickets...

I'll just come out with it: I went to Peru and didn't tell you. That's part of the reason it's been so quiet around here (in addition to a heaping portion of volunteer work and a certain amount of existential turmoil). But anyway, the point is: I'm in Peru. And the week before I left for Peru, I came down with a terrible case of Vacation Outfit Emergency Syndrome (VOES).

Those of you who live in San Francisco know how futile it is to own summer clothes, seeing as how we don't have summer. Which means that the only shorts, bikinis or sundresses a girl is likely to own are the ones she bought for her last beach vacation back in 2007, the days when camo was on the wane but not yet embarrassing. Regardless. In the face of VOES, time and trends are immaterial.

I tried to do right. Knowing that a sustainable sundress was going to be mighty hard to come by, I went through my existing options carefully. I committed to checking ALL the consignment shops before stepping foot in a single boutique, turning myself into a pollo con su cabeza cortada for a good 72 hours. Ultimately I bought two dresses and a belt from Lucky Brand, a completely unapologetic mass-market brand owned by Liz Claiborne Inc. They seem to have a Code of Conduct and some concern for worker's rights, but there's no indication whatsoever that they're contemplating environmental impact.

End result: I feel bad, even while looking good.

It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood...

Internet, meet my new friend Michele.



Michele is a fellow city hippie. She drives a killer vintage Mercedes, has a predilection for giggling, and recently chopped off all her hair. (She tried to cut it herself but quickly realized the folly of her ways and went to a professional. Result: supercuteness.)

Michele is also a wicked biodiesel nerd, which makes sense since she's co-owner of the city's first retail pump, Dogpatch Biofuels. I've been to Dogpatch twice now to fill up, and I've had the chance to shoot the breeze with Michele both times. I predict some day we will drink beer together.

I'll get into the whole biodiesel thing later - pros and cons, why I chose my TDI over a Prius, etc etc. Right now I'm just basking in the unexpected side benefits: like-minded peeps and gasoline that smells like fried chicken.

While we're on the subject of malignant eye boogers...

Last weekend my right eye suddenly poofed itself into an itchy red blight on my face. Having just seen the opthamologist two days prior, I was naturally convinced that I had contracted some sort of highly aggressive, likely incurable, raised-on-antimicrobial-soap eye cancer at her office. HCB got a good laugh out of my diagnosis, but I knew there was something awry in my eye. Aye?

By Monday I was improved enough that permanent blindness seemed unlikely, but I was still curious about said malady's provenance. And then it hit me: my makeup brushes must be Level 4 contaminated. Thinking only of my ocular health, I sped to the nearest Sephora, snapped up a bottle of their brush cleanser and was sprinting for the cash register when, for ONCE, I actually remembered to look at the ingredients.

Finding only a jumble of words and 'less-than' signs on said bottle, none of which sounded remotely like English, I calmly put it back, went home, and trolled the Skin Deep database until I suffered eye strain.

As usual, none of my findings there made any sense either, so I Google stalked us a DIY alternative.

And that is my ridiculously long-winded, highly anticlimactic way of sharing recipes for homemade makeup brush cleaners. You're welcome.

From Tipnut.com:

Recipe #1

1 cup Distilled Water
2 TBS Rubbing Alcohol
1 TBS Baby Shampoo

Recipe #2

1/2 cup Warm Water
1/4 cup Vinegar

Recipe #3

1 cup Warm Water
1 tsp Liquid Castile Soap

Recipe #4

1 cup Warm Water
1 TBS Baby Shampoo

Recipe #5

1/4 cup Warm Water
1 TBS Woolite

Recipe #6

1 cup Warm Water
1 TBS Liquid Dish Detergent

Recipe #7

1 cup Warm Water
1 TBS Baby Shampoo
1/2 tsp Tea Tree Oil

If you're looking for a natural baby shampoo option, I think California Baby rocks.

Malignant Eye Boogers

She's going to kill me for doing it, but I simply MUST post the response I received from my friend Rene about the 3D glasses:

I will hold onto mine (the ones that I don't even have yet because I haven't been to the movie).

I simply don't trust some movie house worker to sanitize them properly, or even at all. In fact, I am assuming they will roll them around in the popcorn bin and then they will hand them right over to the next person, who probably has some case of psoriasis from which I will develop a case of contact dermatitis the second I put said glasses on. The kind of dermatitis that makes the dermatologist say, "Well, it might go away but I recommend taking a 3 month course of antibiotics to really knock it out of your system."

Or worse yet, a professional football player may have worn the glasses right before me and then handed them back to this same lame movie house worker with a stiff case of MRSA attached to the glasses, ready to jump airborne right into my eyeballs.

I could go on about all the ailments I could get, but bottom line: I'm keeping my glasses. I have a good history of this. I had a 3-D book when I was little and kept the glasses until I went to college and my mother made me clean out my room.

She had me at MRSA.

So...humor me for a minute. How CAN we solve the Case of The 3D Glasses? I realize it's wee tiny and generally insignificant, but I'm interested in wee tiny problems. They're solvable. And they always lead to something bigger.

a call sheet + a call to action

I don't know if you've noticed, but HOLY COW PANTS it's been raining hard over the last couple weeks/days/hours/minutes. Perfect weather for sequestering oneself in a dark room with hundreds of little kids in 3D glasses, as HCB and I did at a recent showing of Coraline.

I'm not going to say too much about the movie itself. I think reviews tend to steal the soul of the creative endeavor. But HOLY COW PANTS you should go see this one, if only for the visual thrill. This newfangled 3D technology is a big part of it. As the movie is transporting you to this fantastical alternate world, the 3D is plopping that world right into your lap. I was captivated.

...All the way up to the moment after the movie when we tried to give our glasses back to the usher and she looked at us like we were offering her a steaming turd pile.

There we were, all high on the experience, all excited by the way technology and creativity can come together to inspire, and suddenly WAAAAH WUUUUH.

Obvi I Googled as soon as we got home. I found this blog post saying RealD, the company who created the newfangled 3D technology, had started a glasses recycling program last fall.

Then I got on the horn.

First I called AMC Loews Metreon 16 and talked to a very kind, very nervous person who informed me that I was not the first patron to complain about this, that they were "working on" rolling out the recycling program, and that while they couldn't give me any hard dates, they assured me it would be available "soon".

Then I called AMC's California offices. The receptionist, bless her, was confused.

So I had her transfer me to the corporate office. That receptionist, bless her, was also confused. I finally got through to someone in PR and left a message.

Then I decided to go straight to the source: I left a message for RealD's PR department. And HOLY COW PANTS, they called me right back! I talked to a lovely guy named Eric who told me all about the recycling program - no hard data or dates (though he offered to get them for me), but it's already available in locations nationwide. The glasses are sanitized and repurposed whenever possible, and the remaining sets are sent for plastic recycling. But he also made an excellent point:

They want us to REUSE these glasses. Like, bring 'em back for the next movie.

For sure they ain't yer grandmama's pair. They're sturdy, comfortable, and *almost* stylish, like something Michael Stipe might've worn circa Radio Free Europe. Ahem:


[Yeah, so I'm six eyes. You got somethin' to say about it?]

With 14 RealD movies coming out this year and another 30-40 in the works, it's a safe bet that you really will have occasion to wear them again.

But the thing is, if I have to store them, remember where I put them, and then bring them BACK to the movies every time Pixar anthropomorphizes another water buffalo, I've got about a 0.2% chance of success. And I am the kind of nerdball who religiously carries a water bottle, tupperware, a travel mug and a cloth napkin on her person.

I think the theaters should hold onto them for us. Don't you? And shouldn't they sanitize them onsite, since that'll reduce the carbon expenditure?

Maybe we can help Eric make his recycling program more functional. Anybody got some ideas? If we can't have an effect on the economic stimulus plan(s), we might as well offer our smarts to somebody who'll listen.

I've been thinking...

I'm not sure how I pulled it off, but over the past couple weeks I have convinced several supersmart people to let me encroach upon their supersmart, supersecret gatherings. First I watched the live webcast of the supersmart TED2009 conference at Mark's house with Eric and Andrea and Joanna, all of whom have job titles like Futurist, Strategist or SmartAssMoFo and speak in a supersecret language that's 70% comprised of supersmart-sounding buzz words. (What I couldn't add in conversation I donated in Dynamo Donuts and snarky commentary for their Tweet streams.) It was, in a word, killer.

I've also been volunteering my services as a blogger for Compostmodern, a sustainability conference happening here in SF on Feb 21, wherein I tricked those supersmart peeps into letting me have private conversations with 10 of the supersmartest creative people in the design world. Made my brain hurt so good.

Then last night I winked my way into a sustainability round table hosted by the supersmart dudes at Adobe XD. We're talking a literal round table filled with famous designers and cameras and microphones and name tags and me getting sweaty and eventually gulping down enough Chablis to say something. Or a couple things, both of which I hope weren't, in a word, facile. Again, killer.

So far February 2009 has been the most inspired month of my entire life. Which has got me reflecting, in a deeper way, on my year of Not New and what it did for me. Sure, I saved money. And sure, you've already heard how I'm totally a better person than you due to my extraordinary personal sacrifices. But I hope somewhere in the last 160 posts it came across that sustainability is FUN. It's totally confusing and labrynthine and full of potholes, but there's so much opportunity in the process. I've done dumb stuff, had tantrums, picked fights with grocery boys and revealed a lot of self-indulgent crap to the entire world, but I'm laughing every step of the way. I'm learning constantly because I finally have an excuse to follow my curiosity. I've reconnected with my friends and family over face scrubs, toilet-showers and tofu. I've become a more involved member of my community. And most importantly, I find myself applying my creativity to every single nanoparticle of my life, which opens up more opportunities for joy and discovery and supersecret invites than anything else I know. In the words of Wooderson from Dazed and Confused, I am L-I-V-I-N'.

But that's just me. Now I want to see how other people are doing it. I think instead of populating this site with tips and eco news and one more reprimanding voice of responsibility, I'd like to try to paint a broader picture of the joy that comes with sustainable living. What does a sustainable life look like? Taste like? Feel like? Who's trying to live it? Who's living it without trying? I want to meet people who fight for chicken rights or eschew refrigerators or pedal-power their cell phones or build houses for neighbors in need. Not Ed Begley Jr or Paul Hawken, but normal peeps like you and me.

I'm not sure how I'll do it yet or where it will take me, but hey, that's exactly the fun of it.