{"id":699,"date":"2007-12-03T12:34:26","date_gmt":"2007-12-03T20:34:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/?p=699"},"modified":"2007-12-03T12:34:26","modified_gmt":"2007-12-03T20:34:26","slug":"say-it-cheerleader-saves-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/?p=699","title":{"rendered":"Say It: Cheerleader Saves the World"},"content":{"rendered":"

…in a grain of sand way.<\/p>\n

Among the many things about which H.E. likes to tease me, like my obsessive compulsiveness, my absentminded way with words, and my too-typical addiction to Heroes, is my own desire to save the world. That’s right. Mother Earth.<\/p>\n

Like Al Gore, I was a big believer in global warming long before it became mainstream. I was writing my own science fiction and fantasy about the subject when I was 12 years old, for crying out loud—that’s a whole dozen years ago!—and I really did believe the ozone layer would disintegrate and leave us all vulnerable to the sun’s powerful ultraviolet rays, mutating our cell structures such that we all became aliens in our own land. I felt like a fool when it didn’t happen, though, but how could I have known that our change in hairspray bottles could actually help? Or that the volcanic ash from certain eruptions would help cool the earth down temporarily? In essence, Al and I were still<\/em> right.<\/p>\n

I remember debating the issue with my pen pal Janine in my later teens and twenties, when I despaired over the melting ice caps desalinating the world’s oceans and disrupting their finely tuned balance of warm and cool flowing of water, creating not only the imbalance of sea life and their food sources but also the freaky unforeseen extreme weather patterns that could destroy human communities all over. My frustration knew no bounds because Janine is a middle school science teacher<\/em>, and she, citing one of those “scientists” who believed it was cyclical, disagreed with me. Disagreed! I was crushed. I kept my mouth shut on the subject afterwards, except with H.E., who wholeheartedly agreed with me and who seduced me into dating him by talking about a self-powered home for our future family, and now—NOW!—it’s old hat and considered general knowledge.<\/p>\n

I feel like I’m screaming in one of those dreams where no one hears me, and I’m only just now waking up and realizing … hey, maybe the neighbors hear me after all.<\/p>\n

…even if only feebly.<\/p>\n

But recycling has been a part of my life from the very beginning. Hell, I was born in the Philippines, where resources are scarce. We didn’t have milk; we had milk powder. So when it was time for me to go to school, my mom would buy me a conservative number of pads of paper, and every sheet was brownish gray recycled material, with the rough pulp visible, not bleached brand-new white from fresh trees, like the paper they gave away so endlessly, so freely at the school I attended years later after I moved to the States.<\/p>\n

My family recycled food as though grocery stores were a fairy tale, turning any leftovers into yummy brand new meals or sack lunches for work or school. We grew fruits and vegetables in the back yard and traded with neighbors for produce we didn’t grow ourselves. My uncle fished and brought home the bounty. My other uncle hunted birds and frogs and ate his own bounty as the rest of us looked on in horror. We gave regularly to Goodwill and to Deseret Industries, rather than throw things away, and we donated our unwanted canned goods, rather than toss them out. We borrowed books when we could, instead of buying them. We rented videos. We used the grocery bags again later as trash bags, or book covers. We collected our newspapers and magazines during the week and dumped them in the paper recycling bin down the street on the weekends. We collected our cans and any other cans we found and turned them in for chump change. We didn’t buy manufactured border bricks for our landscaping; we collected local rocks and stones and used those instead.<\/p>\n

OK, so it was mostly because we were cheap or poor that we did these things, but hey, we recycled.<\/p>\n

And I spent much of my childhood imagining tendrils of green life sprouting from the cracks in the walls and the sidewalks and growing, quick and wild as weeds, to overtake every scrap of gray concrete that I saw and hated. This was all long before I even read The Family Tree<\/a>, so when I finally did<\/em> read the book, I fell in love with Sheri S. Tepper all over again for being such a kindred spirit.<\/p>\n

But never mind all that. I still save the world in small ways, for instance, by borrowing books instead of buying them, by purchasing used books instead of new, or now by reading e-books instead of reading tree-murdering print books. I still give to Goodwill; I reuse paper when I can; and damn it, I will eat<\/em> that leftover chicken soup somehow, even if it means using it instead of water to cook my rice.<\/p>\n

…however ineffective my puny attempts at saving the world may be.<\/p>\n

What I really<\/em> wanted to talk about today is aluminum cans. Since the move, I’ve been collecting them because H.E. consumes an ungodly amount of canned diet ginger ale, diet cherry soda, and vegetable juice. Every week, I diligently crush them and put them in their own bag, ready for recycling at a nearby center. I have a separate can for my empty plastic water bottles, too.<\/p>\n

I’ve been doing this because at my last place, my landlord assured me that the trash gets sorted for recycling by the trash collectors, and I took that fact for granted. I asked the apartment managers here for the same assurance, but the answer I got was so uncertain, that I decided not<\/em> to take their word for it, do the Ed Begley Jr.<\/a> thing, and start recycling my own cans again.<\/p>\n

Then—THEN!—in looking for more information on recycling locally, I stumbled upon this little bit<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Recycling<\/strong>
\nIf you live or work in Huntington Beach, you already are recycling. All trash collected by the City’s refuse collector is sorted for you and processed at a Materials Recovery Facility, or MRF (pronounced murf). Huntington Beach residents do not need to sort trash or use separate containers in order to participate in the recycling effort.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hallelujah!!!<\/p>\n

I can rest easy now and be assured that my entire city<\/em> recycles, and I no longer have to feel like I’m pissing against the tide. I have that same glowing pride I experienced when I found out that California is one of only a very few states taking strong measures to lower carbon emissions.<\/p>\n

That said…<\/p>\n

I think I’ll continue to recycle my own cans and plastic bottles. Why? Because H.E. and I consume a lot of fluids, and at 5 cents a shot, not only could I save the world; I might also save myself some chump change.<\/p>\nShare this post:

\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"reddit\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>\"tumblr\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"reddit\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>\"tumblr\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…in a grain of sand way. Among the many things about which H.E. likes to tease me, like my obsessive compulsiveness, my absentminded way with words, and my too-typical addiction to Heroes, is my own desire to save the world. That’s right. Mother Earth. Like Al Gore, I was a big believer in global warming long before it became mainstream. I was writing my own science fiction and fantasy about the subject when I was 12 years old, for crying…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aprilgem.com\/log\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}