Success by Demetri Martin

Sometimes when I'm feeling inadequate for some reason or another, this little graphic can help!

Patriotism

 You know what? America is awesome. It's so full of hope, and small towns, and big cities, and real people, and delicious beverages, and hot guys. You just never know when opportunity is gonna strike--you gotta be ready for it!

-Leslie Knope

WASTE MANAGEMENT IS THE BEST!

Over the past year, I've become slightly interested in sustainability, and extremely interested in waste management. Since I was a kid, I've been instilled with this sense of being economical with my things. At my 13th birthday party, my friend asked for a huge slice of cake and then only took three bites and threw it away--six and a half years later, my mom STILL trash talks her (we are no longer friends) and calls her spoiled, thoughtless, and wasteful. My friend was pretty spoiled, thoughtless, and wasteful (she was in remedial math all through high school, and she drove a black convertible. In an Ohio suburb. Malibu Barbie had a convertible because she lived in Malibu, not Mason, Ohio), but the duration of my mother's hating is a bit harsh, even I will admit.

I had always chalked it down to my parents' childhood during the Cultural Revolution, when they literally had nothing to eat, nothing to own. When you've spent so long with nothing, you learn to appreciate everything. But it's not like I grew up with a lack of things. Even now, I only do my laundry when my socks run out, and that can take weeks, maybe even more than a month, because I have so many clothes! I have so much in excess, but it feels normal. I didn't think twice about throwing away a milk carton or a sandwich that I didn't want to eat, because none of it was important to me. I didn't really think about the milk carton/sandwich's significance outside of its interaction with me--that is I didn't think about the life cycle of my things. Where did they come from? Where did they go? (WHERE DID YOU COME FROM COTTON EYED JOE?) None of it affected me.

And I don't know what the catalyst was, but then I realized that the life cycles of things are so utterly important! Without the life cycle of our things, we wouldn't have our things! So I started paying more attention to how our things began and ended.

I'll talk about beginnings some other time, because currently, I've been much more focused on ends. The "end" in reference here is WASTE! It's the stuff we throw away in the garbage, which then goes to the landfill, and there it stays for a pretty long time. So basically, the problem is that we end up with a lot of stuff that goes unused in a landfill, which is the bad in terms of environmental sustainability (duh), but also in terms of unused value (BIG DUH). This may be a stretched metaphor, but all that stuff in the landfill is basically a 13-year-old girl's uneaten cake.

But it doesn't HAVE to be like that! We can come up with solutions to this problem! I'm currently on the Compost Crew in the Sustainability Service Corps at school, and we think of solutions to this problem by breaking it down into two problems: a.) the amount of waste generated, and b.) the type of waste generated. As a Compost Crew member, I think a lot about how to increase the amount of compost/recycling we get, while reducing the amount of total waste. So in terms of lessening the amount of total waste generated: if we have hot dogs in a warming dish, they probably don't need to be individually wrapped, so that reduces the need for that waste. In terms of type of waste generated: if we need plastic spoons, we should probably get biodegradable plastic spoons rather than regular ones, so that they can be composted. 

Anyways I'm not going to give you a job description--this has all just been an introduction to this theme: I've just been thinking a lot about waste management, and especially the benefits that waste management can bring to individuals and companies, in terms of just saving value. Thinking about the environment is important too, but I think a lot of the rhetoric involved in environmental sustainability can be really polarizing, although it shouldn't be. 

All of this was just a lead up to an article about General Motors' exciting sustainability initiative. The following is my Facebook status, forgive me for copying and pasting:

How totally cool, innovative, and wonderfully efficient! GM committed to going landfill-free in 2005 and now instead of throwing out "waste materials," GM reuses them: 

"Cardboard shipping materials from various GM plants are recycled into sound-dampening material in the headliners of the Buick Lacrosse and Verano to help keep the cabin quiet."

While they definitely had to invest in upfront costs in revamping their waste management system, they've saved/made a billion dollars! WAY TO GO, GENERAL MOTORS!http://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2013/02/21/how-gm-makes-1-billion-a-year-by-recycling-waste/

Please do read the article, it's quite inspirational and creative! Attached are also two screenshots of mini-arguments I then had on Facebook with my close friends (the first is with a very conservative friend, the second, a very liberal friend--note again that these are CLOSE friends, so me calling the liberal friend "Mao" is teasing, not cruel--though I do recognize that it's a thin line I'm treading on) (also note that I prefer not to talk about serious things on Facebook, as I find that it's not really a forum for that, but I was reeeeeally excited about GM!):

Slam!

I posted this a while ago on Twitter, but I thought I'd share it here too! A few months back, Striver's Row, a renowned spoken word/slam poetry group performed on campus. It was my first time experiencing it, and beforehand, I happened to be in a bad mood (you know, one of those times where you stomp around feeling depressed and like you have no friends), so I went alone, and man did fate push me into the right audience that night! Even though I was just one of hundreds of people in the audience, the feel of the words and the weaving of language pulsed through me like a huge emotional wave, bringing me up and pulling me down. At the end of the performances, it felt as if these pulses of feeling had massaged out all the knots of bad moods that had been plaguing me all day, and I left feeling relaxed and refreshed.

That may have just been true for me and my overanalyzing brain though... but regardless, the performances were undeniably gorgeous and dimensioned. They were like dioramas made of language! But enough of my wishy-washy descriptions! To give you a delectable taste, I present "Cab Rides and The Morning After" by Alysia Harris:

Marc Riboud

I recently Google image searched "China 1954" in order to get a better glimpse at what China was like the year that my mom was born (more on this later, hopefully!). Unfortunately, few results returned. Buuuut on the bright side, I was introduced to the fabulous work of French photographer Marc Riboud, who spent many years documenting China and Vietnam in the second half of the 20th century, among his many other projects. Check out some of my favorites below, and here's his site for more!