Welcome to My Life on Earth

Welcome to my “Welcome to My Life On Earth” post. I have two things on my mind as I begin to think about what this blog might offer up in the coming months, and I share them with the hope that they might help you get a sense for who I am and what I'm doing here:

1. If you often struggle to understand why a nice girl needs a Second Life or an online profile full of pictures of herself hugging and mugging for the camera with everyone she knows, then you might enjoy the first thing on my mind.

It’s an article called “Say Everything” that ran in New York magazine back in February of this year. The subtitle sums it up nicely: “As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited.” (I am not so far removed from the "younger people" category that I consider this to be news. It's just a nicely done story that elucidates the divide between the self-pimpers and the rest of us.)

Unlike today’s “younger people,” which to me are teens and tweens and anyone who takes out her ID before the bartender asks for it, I did not fall from my mother’s womb and land in cyberspace. I just got a Facebook profile this year. On it, you will see my birthday (in case you want to wish me a happy one), but not my birth year. If you friend me (and if you know some guy named Ben Serio in Spain he’ll tell you that I don’t “friend” strangers) and try to Facebook-stalk me, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Not only will you fail to learn who among my virtual friends I’ve hooked up with, you won’t see pictures of me doing it either. Even this blogging thing—writing without the knuckle-rapping influence of an editor, a fact-checker, and a copy editor—feels to me something like what those people who have that naked-in-a-crowded-room dream must feel when they wake up: awkward and exposed, until they realize that they’re still in bed, or in this case, cowering behind a keyboard.

2. I read this little bit of snarky drivel while I was getting my haircut the other day. It’s from the current issue of Details—the Power and Influence issue, which features K-Fed both on the cover and inside, ranked seventh on the power list as one of “America’s new parental role models.” That did not stop me, but number 15 did, and it’s of particular relevance here:

15 // The Green Guilt-Tripper
Age: Thirtysomething
Meet the greener-than-thou crusader: your smug suburban neighbor with the Prius, the bumper-stickery guy in line at the burrito place, the soul-patched do-gooder in the next cubicle. They’re the voices of 21st-century green guilt, and they have more power over you than you care to admit. They influence what you buy (and what you don’t), what you drive, what you drink, how you dress, how you fry your eggs, and what kind of chicken laid the damn things in the first place. “We’re the people who remind you to save the world,” they sneer. And you’re the guy who says, “Maybe tomorrow, dude.” That is, if there is a tomorrow.

(Side note: Yes, I understand that the editors of Details are trying to sell their magazine, and by extension, keep their jobs as recession looms large. With that in mind, I was not surprised to see the lines “enough already with the fake boobs” and “Are you turning your kid into a douchebag?” on the cover. Sadly, I have no doubt that those are the kind of pick-me-up cover lines that sell magazines.)

I like snarky and irreverent. I don’t particularly like the overly earnest. And I definitely don’t like smug people, so if these suburban green guilt-trippers of which Details speaks do in fact exist, I probably wouldn’t like them much either. I don’t think I’ve ever called myself an environmentalist, and I don’t think I ever will. And so I’m surprised by how much this one got under my skin.

After some thought, I’ve decided that the reason this one irks me so is that it strikes me as about as funny and cool as the clowns in high school who thought it was lame to be smart, and even lamer to do your homework and get good grades. Unlike getting an A in calculus, remembering to buy the funny looking light bulb when the kitchen light blows out is not that hard. It’s not so awful to turn the thermostat up a degree in the summer or down one in winter. It’s pretty easy to buy energy-saving appliances without doing any of the research that might make someone feel, look, or smell smart: Someone named EnergyStar has done it for you. Once you go through the monumental effort to put a paper bag next to the garbage can to collect bottles and cans, recycling is relatively brainless. I don't know anybody who acts smug because he or she does these things.

I’m suddenly sounding very earnest, which I don’t like, and it takes me back to that naked feeling I described earlier. Getting to the point: When I make a big mess in the office kitchen or drop trash on the street, I pick it up. I think trying to live a little greener is in line with all of that—it’s about cleaning up your own messes. And so it seems my goal here is to keep a little log of the ways in which I go about living lightly on the planet so that others can see it’s not that hard, and maybe even try to do the same. There are a lot of green living blogs out there, and I bet you’re wondering what will make this one different. We’re not going to tell you what to do everyday, though I might let you peer into my brain as I try to figure out what I’m going to do. You might like that. If you do, come back. Maybe tell your friends. We’ll have a party. I’ll friend you on Facebook. Then we’ll hug in pictures. It’ll be great.