"The idle mind knows not what it wants"

Drinking this tea makes me happy, but thinking about its environmental impact does not.

I’m not a practicing Catholic, yet I have IT. Guilt. It’s genetic, I’m sure. My grandmother was so generous that her nickname was Martyr Mary. And my mother left me a voicemail the other day saying she hoped I wasn’t upset that she got off the phone with me to take a call from my pregnant sister (she actually felt the need to reassure me that she loves us equally). I don’t have children so the focus of my guilt is the environment. I berate myself when I forget my reusable grocery bags in the car when I’m shopping, inevitably not realizing I don’t have them until I’m standing in line with my bread and broccoli on the conveyer belt.

Another case in point: that hard-working sandwich bag with the tiny smear of residual peanut butter that I keep in my lunch sack to reuse, day after day. When should I finally recycle it and get a new one? At the start of the new week, or is that arbitrary? When does it become unsanitary, or just socially gross?

I’m concerned about my obsession over these trivial questions, although I can justify it too. I’m single, so I don’t have a spouse and children to distract me, and I spend a fair amount of time by myself commuting to work, which leaves time to reflect, ponder ... and berate.

It’s like the more I learn, the worse I get. I’ve started keeping my phone charger unplugged; that one’s easy. I’m turning off my computer more, but on the nights I don’t the whirling fan taunts me from across the room after I’ve turned the light off, like when Monica can’t stop thinking about the shoes she left in the living room on that one episode of Friends.

I can joke and say I have Environmental OCD, but sometimes I get annoyed at myself for feeling guilty. I know these fixations aren’t rational because the amount of energy I’m saving is infinitesimal. Yet it’s like I want to be perfect. But of course the idea of creating no waste doesn’t exist because I exist. I live, breathe, eat, consume, and everything I do leaves a trail. But how close can you get to perfect? Should I have recycled my 4-inch-by-2-inch Metro ticket? Can I recycle the thin plastic that my box of Twinings tea was wrapped in? I ask this as my hand hovers over the trash and recycle cans, paralyzed with indecision. And come to think of it, should I have bought tea imported from England? Think of the petroleum used to get it here.

Part of my purpose in starting this blog is to try to answer these questions, and the larger question of what is my personal responsibility for helping stop global warming. I hope to educate myself (like how does composting work?) and figure out what more I can do to enrich our world, and while doing so, my life.