Eveningland

A beautiful piece of music

Can't Tell me Nothin'

I just finished up my third year of medical school, of which the last 7 months were spent on the road traveling from place to place. I actually haven't had a permanent residence until recently which really put a crimp in my "green" efforts, and for all intensive purposes many of my new found habits fell by the wayside like faithful recycling because well most of the communities I visited did not have recycling programs. I still did simple things though like use less energy by turning lights off, not leaving the heater or A/C on when I was not there, buying organic, etc. I had effectively fallen off the green map. I stopped blogging regularly and stopped reading other blogs regularly, and when I returned recently to catch up I was surprised at my reaction to some of the things I read.

I went by Colin B's blog No Impact Man which I absolutely loved the first year he posted. He highlighted his family's struggles with green life changes in their year long experiment. When that concluded I lost interest, but I figured I'd drop by and give it another chance.

I started reading his post "A sad observation I had on a mountain" in which he says:

At lunch one day, I briefly met two women, sitting at the next table. While I was eating, I overheard one say to the other, "Do you think there will be enough shops in town to keep us occupied?"

Here we were, on a mountain. By a lake. With horses. And canoes. My new friends were only here for one day. But the only thing they could think to do was leave and go shopping.

I'm not judging. I just feel sad.

I think we tend to know what we're taught. And instead of being taught to enjoy our beautiful habitat, so many of us have been taught to shop, and by the associated resources use, contribute to its destruction.

If a mountain is reflected in a lake, and we're all too busy too notice, is it still beautiful?

I was surprised because I think previously my reaction would have been agreement, however this time it was something that more closely approximated disenchantment with the melodrama of it all. I just returned from a week long trip to Alaska which was awesome. I got to see so much wildlife and really loved my time there, but while preparing for my trip many people I knew made comments like "wow you must really be an outdoors person to go on a trip like that" while others said "wow I wish I could go." Some people like the outdoors others don't. It shouldn't surprise anyone that some people would rather spend their lives indoors. Right now in the Southern United States with a heat index over 100 outside, indoors with A/C looks pretty nice. I'm also puzzled about why shopping has been totally demonized in the green community. My favorite type of shopping is thrift store shopping which one could argue is better than the alternative of buying something new. It's better on the pocketbook too. The bottom line is though is let's be realistic. I'm going to have to buy things to live. Why feel guilty about it? Why be sad that some lady would rather shop? Who says she didn't appreciate the beauty of that mountain but didn't feel the need to stare at it for an extended period of time?

I think we can have both. We can shop and take in our mountain views too. We can live in the real world instead of some altered version of reality where people obsess over buying new clothes, plastic ware, and properly heating or cooling our homes. I've blogged about this before. The green community is rife with self flagellation that smacks of fanaticism that is only rivaled by organized religion.

I'm not convinced actions like giving up driving or air conditioning is saving anything. Instead I think it's an attempt to control what we cannot. We feel like if we stop using enough toilet paper or don't buying anything new for months we are actually making a difference. Meanwhile the world is still consuming energy at an astronomical rate, the population is still growing, the temperature is still rising. I don't want to sound fatalistic but I'd rather accept that I want to live comfortably and not everything I do is environmentally friendly than sit sweating away the hot summers days, simmering away in my own self righteousness while some lady happily shops the day away without another thought.

Medical Error?

While studying today I spotted an interesting spelling error in my textbook. Can you figure out what it is?

iObsession: Green App "The Good Guide"

I recently bought an iPhone for work after being thoroughly frustrated with my Palm Treo and needing to use my upgrade with AT&T before Mr. Boyfriend and I consolidate our cell phone accounts (and lives) under the impending shadow which is our wedding next week.

I liked the touch phone capabilities of my Treo and wasn't willing to relinquish them which pretty much eliminated all the Blackberries leaving the iPhone. I had iPhone fever when it first came out but it didn't support medical programs at the time so I decided against it. It kind of fell off my radar after that, so when I picked up the phone I wasn't that excited... until I figured out the amazing power and evil which are applications.

Now I spend my time browsing the iTunes App Store for free apps and amazingly there are several green apps out there. So far there the one that stands out is called "The Good Guide" which is a reference rating 70,000 products thereby creating a "comprehensive source of information on the environmental, social, and health performance of products and companies" according to their website. They come up with these ratings via:

Different types of information [that] flow into GoodGuide's system: absolute measures, relative measures, and binary measures. Absolute measures describe measurable activities of a company or product. For example, the pounds of toxic air emissions released per year, the CEO's salary, or the amount of money a company donated to charity. Relative measures are scores, such as a numerical grade of "6.5 out of 10" or a textual grade of "bad" to "excellent." Binary (or Yes/No) measures indicate whether a product or company does or does not have specific characteristics. For example, a product may or may not have earned an environmental certification, or a company may or may not test its products on animals.

Apparently the whole thing started as a project at UC Berkley. I'm a little baffled at how they offer the information for free, and it makes me a little suspicious of how reliable their information is and what their motives are. Because their data collection and rating system is not very accessible it's hard to say what's included or not and why. They are a "for benefit" corporation which I had never heard of before. I couldn't figure out how the heck they fund the thing. I didn't see any ads on the site. Is it grant money? Who knows? So take it all with a grain of salt, but it's a place to start when you're standing in the store deciding between orange juice brands.

Sneaky Sacrifices

There's a running joke at my house that Mr. Boyfriend is always right. He suggests I try something, I dismiss it; only to emerge months later singing the praises of the thing he suggested eons ago. He just shakes his head. 

Case in point, author David Sedaris. Months ago, when Mr. Boyfriend was packing up to move we were digging through a box of books. He produced a copy of David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day, assuring me it was funny and that I should read it. I looked at the book distastefully, misjudged the content, and thought, "How funny can some dude's memoir on a speech impediment be?" The copy got sold to Half Price Books and the move commenced. Last month I was in a small town doing a rotation and visited the local public library in order to find a quiet refuge away from the hospital in which to study. To my unbridled delight they were having a massive book sale where you paid 5 dollars, got a massive resuable tote bag and could take as many books as could fit. I was practically dancing a jig around the tables of old library rejects. 

I was on a big Ken Follet kick at the time so I gleaned all of his remaining titles, only to find my bag still 2/3 empty. My amazing cheapness/greed took over and I decided to fill the rest of the bag with random books by authors I had stocked in my previous life as a bookstore clerk but had never read. I purposefully grabbed a bunch of things I would normally steer clear of in an attempt to be spontaneous and expand my tastes. I ended up grabbing a copy of Sedaris' Dress your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and I stuffed it to the bottom of the back forgetting about it. 

A few weeks after that Mr. Boyfriend and I literally got caught in a flash flood and were marooned in my tiny sedan in a parking lot, waiting for the waters to subside. There was nothing to do but take a book from the bag I'd left in my back seat and read a while. I opted for a western, while Mr. Boyfriend fished out the Sedaris title and began to read. Only a few minutes later he was chuckling outloud, while nothing had happened in my book. Not even an Indian Raid or scalping... lame. I bitterly asked what was so funny, which progressed to goading him into reading outloud. Pretty soon we had moved to a Valero gas station parking lot to procure provisions, and were feasting on doritos, jerky, and coffee while taking turns reading takes of Sedaris' childhood misadventures out loud. 

Three of his books later, I was rebuying the original title that I'd dismissed and sold to Half Price. Mr. Boyfriend was standing in the humor aisle shaking his head. Within this book, I was pleasantly surprised to see Sedaris' address green issues. He makes a great point, I had never thought about.

Why is it that business always ply their customers with "green guilt" over amenities they offer for free but never ones you pay for? The examples he gives are napkins and hotel sheets. He says that while he understands that one should conserve paper, why don't they worry about the paper used to make the cups for the drink they just sold you? Which brings up a good point? If a business is so worried about conservation why don't they use more reusable dishes and cups? He also talks about the fact that he paid 200+ dollars a night to stay in a hotel and wanted his sheets changed daily to get the most out of his stay. While I'm sure it does cut down on energy and water to reuse towels and sheets, why don't hotels install more energy efficient equipment instead? Why does so much of the burden fall on the consumer and not the producers? 

Sure it's whiny argument that's moot but it made me feel slightly taken advantage of. I wonder how often our green sensibilities are manipulated by companies for their own thinly veiled gains? Hmmm. 

Oh and I hope to do more product reviews soon. There are a couple of green products I've got coupons for and want to try out but haven't reached stores in my area yet so stay tuned.

Tornado? Awesome.

Anyone that knows me in "real life" knows I have asthma, bad eyesight, and the strength of an 8 year old child. I spend most of my days thinking that walking around a hospital is strenuous, but when I accidentally caught Discovery Channel's Out of the Wild, it rekindled a deep desire to leave behind all the everyday technological conveniences and go up against nature.

Maybe that's why I get so excited when there's a natural disaster. Hurricane? Sounds great, there won't be any power for days. I like candles and books. Tornado? awesome. Flood? even better.

I'm obsessed with post-apocalyptic fiction and spend my days daydreaming about a world where I get to spend lots of time outside planting things.

I think that's one reason I want to be a country doctor. I've got this crazy subconscious idea that if I get far enough away from concrete and close enough to trees and dirt I might actually accidentally run into nature. But after seeing this show it makes me wonder. Can you take trips like this? Can you go to survival school and then be unleashed in a pack of people, to hike for weeks on end? I sure hope so because it sounds awesome.

Never mind the fact that the farthest I've ever walked in one day is 10 miles and that I could barely walk afterward.

Slumdog Medical Student

It's interesting if you reflect on why and how you know the things the you know. In the movie Slumdog Millionaire an uneducated impoverished protagonist wins at "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" because he coincidentally (and often tragically) knows the answers from random life experience.

Sometimes being a medical student is a little like being on a game show... except you're paying them to play instead of vice versa. There are constant questions. You have to know the answers quickly and it isn't always a book that leads to the right answer. Case in point, I was recently asked what the maximum heart rate of a woman in her 80s. I racked my brain for medical knowledge and when that failed I remembered. A whisper in the back of my brain.

...220-age...

It was on a poster in 2 gyms I've worked out at. I used to stare at the posters while running on the treadmill. It was to help you calculate a heart rate to work out at.

So I answered 220-age. They assume I read it in a book and not on a gym wall. It just reinforces false illusions. You get asked about such a small esoteric amount of knowledge that the answer to a handful of questions is all attending physicians have to decide is this student smart or not? I personally think that's ridiculous. I also think discouraging or ridiculing questions is also counterproductive.

I'm already making a list a mile long of the way things are going to be when I'm the attending or resident. How kind I'll be to my students. How much I'll teach. Plans the way a child dreams about staying up late and eating ice cream every night for dinner. I know there's a reason attendings are ornery, I just hope I never find out what it is, and get the pleasure of teaching a Slumdog Medical Student of my own.