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2005-11-28 - 11:57 Today: Yes, I'll admit it. 181 pounds. Sigh. Just got in touch with the New American Dream today. What a breath of fresh air, as it were. I was inspired over the Thanksgiving holiday. Lincoln and I went with his parents to a place just south of Zion National Park. There are two towns there, Springdale and Rockville. Between the two towns, there are about 700 people. Springdale is your typical resort town, filled to overflowing with motels and little gift boutiques. While it made my consumer bone itch to see them all (no, really, I NEED another sweatshirt), I shuddered when I realized that probably everything in those souveneir shops was mass produced in Mexico rather than having anything to do with the local community. Just more crap people are going to throw away. The character of Rockville was much different. This is the little town where my boyfriend's father was born and raised. The only public facilities are the church and the community center. There are no commercial buildings at all, only several home-based family businesses. I am madly in love with this town and I want to live there. My sweet boyfriend bought me a little ring at one of the gem shops in Springdale (made of local smoky quartz by the proprietor of the shop), and I will let it symbolize and remind me of my commitment to live consciously. Here's where I'm starting: I work as a professional secretary. Right now I'm a temp. I drive anywhere from five to twenty miles each way to work, depending on where the assignment is. I also drop my boyfriend off and pick him up from work several days a week. He works about fifteen miles away as a chef. I drive a Jeep Grand Cherokee V-8 which is way bad-ass and I love it, but it gets 14.5 miles to the gallon. Eek. I am desperately out of shape (8 pounds overweight as of yesterday morning and can barely walk a mile). I eat the typical American processed garbage and I eat out most the time. I just dropped seventy bucks at Wal-Mart for things I'm not sure I need. I am living a life of quiet desperation. I want to live more in accordance with my values, especially nonviolence and sustainability, but how can I do that making ten bucks an hour? It kills me when my son sings commercials in the car and begs for plastic toy weapons. Christmas is coming and the whole idea just makes me want to hide. I took the ecological footprint quiz (sorry, I forgot where I found it) and discovered that if everyone consumed as much as I do, we would require 4.1 planets to sustain us all. My ecological footprint is 18 acres, but there are only about 4.4 acres per person available to use. The website gave me strategies to reduce my footprint to 11 acres by doing the following: The hardest part about that is going to be reducing the travel time. Right now, I'm driving about 400 miles a week. My ideas include letting Linc take the train unless it's yucky out or we have plans (he really doesn't mind), walking more places and taking that transcription course so I can work from home instead of having to drive to work. I've also been dreaming big dreams about moving to Rockville and building a strawbale house with composting toilets. I found some of the coolest houses ever on www.balewatch.com, all using alternative construction (one is made from earth-filled tires). This would be after I married Lincoln, of course (something that he has shown no inclination to do). This will obviously have to wait. In other news, I'm still no closer to moving out of my Dad's house. I thought I was going to have the perfect excuse to move in with Lincoln. Not that I wanted this in the least, but we thought I was pregnant. Turns out not. I still think we could live together (more for convenience than anything else), but I'm loath to push the issue. I promised my aunt that I would spend a week with my grandparents in January, to test the idea that I could live in Fairview and assist in their maintenance. I would support myself my doing medical transcription from home. This would also solve my housing problem, but it would mean I would live in Fairview until my grandparents passed away or went into a home (an idea to which I fervently object). We'll see what happens.
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