Increasing the
Environment*

I read a lot of magazines. I know that's not very green. But I have to know what's going on. And I feel gross bringing my laptop into the bathroom. I especially read a lot of magazines about awesome (and usually expensive) furniture. I used to love the design magazine Nest because the people in there would do stuff like wrap their staircases in electrical tape and then be all proud of it. It was a magazine less about being crazy-rich than being simply plain old crazy.

Anyway, Nest is long gone. So now I like Domino. It seems aimed at 23-year-old women, but I like it anyway. I especially like its feature about eco-people and their green lives, written as a daily timetable ("11 a.m.: Jet to Paris. To offset my carbon footprint I log on to a website that plants trees in your name and have Oregon personally reforested. Slide on Hermes sleep mask and slumber righteously."). Here's my own green day:

6 a.m.: Be kissed awake by the roar of garbage trucks. They say RECYCLING on the side, but I think they don't mean it since it seems they dump all the recycling bin stuff right in with the other trash. Smell their exhaust through my open bedroom window. We have no air-conditioning. This already makes me way greener than almost all of you. How will you catch up to Eco-Me?

6:20 a.m.: Stand on my apartment balcony drinking green tea. I'd buy the fair-trade kind, but it doesn't taste as good. And none of it tastes as good as grape soda. But that's a sacrifice I make for the planet.

7 a.m.: Wash dishes from night before. Scrub the sink with environmentally friendly yet useless powder that is not as good as Comet. Feel despair over white enamel slowly turning brown.

8:30 a.m.: Morning walk with my husband/partner/whatever. My eco-suit = threadbare sweatpants, T-shirt my friend Lydia made for me that reads R. KELLY IS MAGIC, and most progressively, New Balance shoes that are not from Nike and therefore not glued together by child slaves. You're welcome, child slaves.

10 a.m.: Commute to work--from the kitchen to my desk. Don't hate me because I figured out a way to get paid for sitting around at home in my pajamas and never having to drive anywhere except to the grocery store that's three blocks away.

11:30 a.m.: Drive to that grocery store. Bring own bags. While driving home think about how Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster is better than An Inconvenient Truth.

Noon: Eat lunch. Toss orange peel into the wrong trash can. Get berated by husband/partner/whatever. When he demands that I retrieve the peels, inform him I've already washed my hands and that to stick them into trash would mean rewashing them, and doesn't he care about water, Mother Earth's most precious resource? Watch as he sticks his own hands into the trash.

2:30 p.m.: Writer's block. Need a snack. Organically harvested goji berries are gnarly, no matter how many antioxidants they have. Go to my local fancy bakery for some of those French macarons, like the kind Kirsten Dunst ate in Marie Antoinette. There's nothing green about this except the color of the pistachio-flavored ones.

3:15 p.m.: Watch Oprah. She's got a bunch of Dumpster-diving "freegans" on her show. Enjoy pausing TiVo each time she makes the "eww" face. Pay bills online while watching the show. Get tiny thrill at how superior and futuristic I am for not using paper or stamps.

5 p.m.: Go to a home store and spend a lot of money on one-of-a-kind shelves made from reclaimed wood. Bring them home and stack old issues of magazines on them.

*Title of column responsibly recycled from an episode of The Sarah Silverman Program