Garbage

I went to the beach today with my family (my dog, my husband, and my 2-year-old daughter). As a family outing, it was very pleasant. We went to one of the several island beaches that neither locals nor tourists seem to visit. The beach is not accessible by road, and can only be visited by people willing to walk 200 meters to reach it. Hence, the beach is largely deserted. Neither boats nor moorings obscured the view. Native plants still inhabit the hillsides around this beach, and you can just barely make out a couple of houses in the distance. My daughter frolicked in the surf and giggled. My dog fetched balls obsessively (as usual). My husband and I facilitated these activities and generally enjoyed the peace and quiet.

Towards the end of our visit, I got out the empty bag I had brought for collecting garbage. (It seems I do this almost everywhere I go now.) At first, there did not seem to be much trash. Then, we started picking it up. Once my brain fixed on the "garbage" search image, I was seeing it everywhere. My bag began to fill up, but plastic drink bottles still littered the beach. Hundreds of drink box straws were wedged under rocks. Monofilament lines and nets were tangled around driftwood. We began to pick and choose what to take and what to leave behind. Those plastic straws are dangerous to marine life, but there were too many of them. We could never even make a dent in the amount of time we had. Milk jugs take up a lot of space in the bag, but they never decompose. We decided to fill up our beach bag with some of the cleaner trash, and so were able to take away all the drink bottles.

My husband hoisted our daughter and a dilapidated chair (large, but light). I carried the bags. As we headed up the trail, we saw more drink bottles and other garbage under the trees at the trail head, but we had to turn our heads away. Our arms were full. Our bags were full. We walked away.

Picking up garbage is always like that. I have been on beach cleanups with large groups, dozens of large trash bags, and a waiting boat to haul the garbage away. Always, we run out of time before we run out of trash.

Is this what our species is? We generate inconceivably large quantities of garbage. We throw on the side of the road, in the woods, into the water from our boats. It makes me feel guilty for living on this planet, for adding another person to it, for the KFC I bought for dinner last night.

Carefree

The mid-semester rush has come and gone. I have just given up pumping milk at work. My daughter actually plays by herself sometimes, and there are several holidays in November. I am suddenly very free. I feel strangely light and cheerful and also like I keep forgetting something important (maybe I'm radioactive? no, that can't be it). The weather has turned very pleasant here, and we have all this free time now. My family actually went to the beach on a Wednesday afternoon this week. Now I must try and remember what I used to do with myself in my spare time. Jigsaw puzzles? Christmas shopping?

This feeling might also have something to do with our tenants having moved out. They were rather loud people. Not in a party-hearty sort of way, but in a "let's air out our dirty laundry for the whole neighborhood to hear" sort of way. Also they had an extraordinarily loud car and would sometimes come and go late at night. We would have thrown them out except they had a baby, and how can you throw people with a baby out on the street? They finally realized the apartment was much too small for them and moved out of their own accord. We've decided to keep the apartment as guest quarters. It's so peaceful and relaxing at home now.

Maybe I'll think of something serious to post next time.

Insanity in the work place

Among the insane: myself and my newly hired colleague.

My insanity lies in ageeing to take on some administrative duties (which are supposed to take up about 1/3 of my time). The last time I agreed to this (year 2001), it was because the then current administrator was doing a terrible job. I figured it had to be less stressful to do it myself. I quickly discovered that mid-level administrators have a habit of dumping all their random unfunded mandates onto the plates of lower-level administrators. "Oh, by the way, so-and-so wants a program rationalization for the biology department by the end of the week. Take care of that, would you?"

So when I got pregnant (year 2004), I quit administration to reduce my stress level. A senior, experienced, tenured faculty member agreed to take over the job. I thought lower-level adminstration was in good hands. Alas, my senior colleague did very little in the way of administering our program. Some of the things my colleague did not do inlcude scheduling classes (rather important) and holding program meetings. So when the mid-level administrator asked me to take the lower-level job again, I agreed on the condition that I would not comply with any unfunded mandates. I am sticking strictly to the job description ... supposedly. We'll see.

I spent a fair part of my summer stressing out trying to hire a new faculty member at the last minute. (My original plan had been to write a journal article and also relax a little. Oh, well.) At least we've hired someone, that has to be good, right? (Well, maybe.) When Mid-level administrator heard that the book for New faculty member's class hadn't arrived in the bookstore, Mid-level asked me to check up on New and see if New needed any help. Since New is rarely in his office (hmmm, that's odd), I sent a brief email to New. Whereupon New asked why I was accusing him of not doing any work. Excuse me? I spent (read: wasted) 45 minutes of my life assuring and reassuring New that no one was accusing him of shirking; we just wanted to know if he needed any help with anything. ThenI spent another 45 minutes of my life helping New do his job, and afterwards New went to his office (at last). Then New wrote a long email to Mid-level complaining about being accused of not doing his job after classes had only been in session for 1.5 weeks, and based solely on rumors originating from unknown students. Excuse me?

God, please don't let New be insane.

Taking a stroll ....

Supermom is on vacation ... I guess my little daughter is stuck with regular mom for the duration. I'm pretty sure I could do better at all this mom stuff if I could only get Isome exercise. I used to go for a long walk every day. Even when I was pregnant and sick as a dog I still walked most days. After the baby was born I carried her on a walk nearly every day for 18 months.

My daughter now refuses to be carried. She responds to carrying with wiggling, squirming, whining, and "no,no,no!". She wants to walk, and she can walk surprising far and fast for someone her age. She walked a full two miles at a walk-a-thon two weeks ago. Unfortunately, she has a completely different idea of the purpose of a walk than I have. My little darling wants to watch every millipede cross the road and to explore every tall grass jungles alongside the road. She wants to collect every stray rock and tropical fruit along our route. Sometimes she just wants to squat unmoving for several minutes at a time. Every snail merits individual examination. In short, every step of her journey is a learning experience.

While I admire H's agility with deep knee bends, my energy level is slipping. H's development is a wondrous process to observe, but lack of exercise is fogging my brain. It's amazing to walk hand in hand with my daughter, but now I have a dilemma. How can I fit in more exercise without losing any of the precious minutes I spend with H?

Supermom strikes again

Some things I did today:

1. Went to work: cleaned up laboratory, prepared class materials for next Thursday, taught 1 seminar and 1 lecture
2. Fetched my daughter from daycare
3. Delivered tax return to revenue bureau & got a little stamp that proves I did it
4. Bought groceries
5. Laundered diapers
6. Loaded, ran, & emptied dishwasher
7. Played with and prepared snack for my daughter
8. Walked the dog
9. All the usual (nursing, snacks, medicines, bedtime, etc.)

Why is it that some days I can do so much and other days I seem to accomplish nothing tangible?

civilized dining

My daughter has learned to feed herself with a spoon and (to some extent) a fork. She has also learned not to throw her dishes. She looks very grown up eating her food out of a bowl with a spoon. It is also a good deal less messy than her previous method of eating which involved, for instance, eating yogurt with her fingers (most of it somehow wound up in her hair). I am starting to envision my daughter as a little girl (rather than a baby or a toddler). This little girl has a thinner face and thicker, longer hair than my child as she actually is now. I want to say, "Hello little girl. I'm pleased to meet you. Would you like to stay for supper?" Of course, current version of my daughter can not answer questions in a civilized manner yet. Most likely, she'll answer with a frantic shake of the head and a firm "na"- bringing her mommy firmly back down to earth.

high fructose corn syrup

A friend's comments on high fructose corn syrup have inspired me to start reading food labels again (I’m sure I used to read them about a million years ago when I was single and childless). My husband was out of town last week, so I was looking for spaghetti sauce in a jar. I think I’ve figured out why I started making my own (not from scratch, but from canned stuff) to begin with: Every single jar had some kind of sugar added. Most had high fructose corn syrup. Why on earth would you add sugar, let alone high fructose corn syrup, to spaghetti sauce? Then I went looking for some cookies. I figured if I was buying cookies I should at least buy some that weren’t too terribly unhealthy, so I read the labels again and … all but one kind of cookie on the shelf had high fructose corn syrup! The ones that are marketed especially towards kids were the worst of the lot. I’m starting to consider the possibility of a food industry conspiracy.

Why?