Brooks got Netflix a couple of weeks ago. As a result, I have watched more documentaries in the past two weeks than in the entirety of the rest of my life. I like being informed, but generally if I'm watching television it's because I want to turn my brain OFF for a while, not think MORE.
I've been thinking about my consumption. Of food, of resources, of time. My body is not very resilient, so what I put into my body and the quality of what I put into my body is very noticeable. I need to keep track of what I eat and what nutrients are contained therein. Since I've began buying more organic and locally grown foods, my mood, health, and general wellbeing have all improved (recent autoimmune problems excepted). I used to eat cereal every morning for breakfast. It's cheap and quick. I used to eat lots of Special K cereal, thinking I was being heart healthy and losing weight! (That is what they advertise on the box). I was very disturbed to find out that Special K spikes your blood sugar faster than eating sugar straight out of the container. I used to crash every morning a couple of hours after breakfast, and I just blamed it on the caffeine wearing off. I now fix my own (generally carb free) breakfast every morning and I don't experience that crash. This whole time I was feeling like hell and it was from my bowl of breakfast cereal!
Excessive carbohydrate intake is very correlated to diabetes. I have diabetes on BOTH sides of my family, so I have to get this under control. I still eat carbs, they're delicious! But I have gone from eating carbs with every meal to only eating one a day on average. Some days I eat no carbohydrates at all. Instead, I eat more meat, fruit, and veggies. I feel SO much better on this diet, and my random GI problems are vastly improved.
I bought a game called Fate of the World. It's a bit of a lame name, but hey, they're English. The premise is that you have been made president of a worldwide organization put in place to bring global warming under control. This is the hardest game I have ever played. The company that made it worked in conjunction with Oxford University using real data and models of everything. The amount of research and data that went into this game is staggering, and as a player you have to interpret that data to bring emissions down while keeping the people happy AND preventing economic crisis. It's not easy. "Change transportation from fuel-powered to electric"? Surely that will bring emissions down! Well, did you remember to check to see how the electricity in that country is generated? If it comes primarily from coal-burning power plants, emissions just went up, and you're totally boned.
What this translates to is that the world is totally boned. The amount of waste and uninhibited consumption is disgusting. I've been playing this game for months and have YET to be able to bring global warming down to +3 degrees of warming by 2200. This game has really gotten to me. Changes MUST be made. I spend a lot of my down time trying to think of new solutions to our problems. I'm limited on the things I can change now, being a poor college student living in an apartment, but once I have more freedom I want to change my lifestyle to be less of a consumer. I want to have a compost bin, drive less (or never), buy local produce, use less goddamn plastic. What I would really like is to have a garden and some assorted farm animals. What I really need is to be able to inspire other people to change, too.
We're wasting our lives, filling them with twinkies and cellophane and easy mac and thinking that we're not doing anything wrong.
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