Hello, my name is Louise and I suffer from OCSD

Now that Therese's term, obsessive-compulsive sustainability disorder or OCSD, is starting to hit the mainstream as a true disorder (what? a mention in the Huffington Post doesn't count?), I feel it is time that I publicly recognize that I may fall within the spectrum of OCSD sufferers. To be honest, I hadn't realized that I had OSCD until I read that Therese felt cutting open an "empty" lotion bottle was a bit obsessive. I thought it was what everyone did.

I recently came to the realization that I may be deeper into the OCSD spectrum when I spotted a tea bag hiding in the trash and nearly fell over myself yanking it out. I tried to ignore it but couldn't. Yes, I reached in—between the plastic raw-chicken wrapper and used tissues—grabbed the lonely bag, and dropped it in the compost bin. What was Andrew thinking? Was he playing a game? Like he does by loading the dishwasher incorrectly? (Small plates in front, big in back—that's not so hard to remember.) Anyway, after relocating the tea bag I began wondering what else might be lurking in the can but then my nose got the best of me so I just hauled the trash bag out and cinched it shut. There were an awful lot of tissues.

For me, thanks to OCSD, even a perfectly lovely dinner party can be cause for a throbbing, guilt-ridden ache in that large section of my brain devoted solely to agida. And the only one I have to blame for this is me...for inviting guests who just don't get it. Okay, okay, maybe my expectations are too high. Just because we live in a rural community surrounded by farms doesn't mean that everyone should understand the importance of composting (recycling is another thing that gets my OCSD bubbling). I know I shouldn't really expect kind guests who jump up to help clear the table to know that the red bucket sitting in our sink is for food scraps. Those castaways help feed the chickens which in turn produce those amazing orange-yolked eggs that everyone loves. Seriously, guests clearing the table put a damper on my spirits. I hear you thinking: You're a nut! Why don't you just ask them to leave the dishes? I do. But you know how guests are. Or, why don't you just tell them how you'd like the dishes done? Because if I do that they'll think I'm bossy and obsessive. I know, you don't need to say it.

So I let them scrape the dishes directly into the trash, prewash the plates in hot water, and load the dishwasher incorrectly. I thank them profusely for their help—trying my best to sound cool and gracious—but can't stop wondering why the heck they must waste so much? Sure, the first time we had guests over I wasn't so cool. That would be the dinner where I was caught diving into the trash to retrieve the veggie scraps. A guest caught me with a handful of pastalettucebreadpudding and gave me a look of surprised disgust as she backed away and went searching for her coat. I felt awful. She was a guest after all and I didn't want her to feel bad for helping. I just couldn't help myself. But that was then. I've developed various coping mechanisms since. If they don't take my cue and insist on helping, I wait until they leave before scooping out what I can from the trash and rearranging the dishwasher (ask Andrew about that).

Of course, there is still the problem of how to handle myself when I go to someone else's house and volunteer to help with the dishes. I find myself searching for a composting bin. If they don't have one, I can't stand it. But what can I do? I'm not about to preach to anyone other than my sister (really now, she should know better; we grew up in a house with a compost bin permanently located next to the sink). Instead, I keep my mouth shut and mutter to Andrew about the unnecessary waste of it all. And when I return home, I make myself a cup of tea.



Last night, we had another dinner party. Lovely time all around. Although I'm not sure how Andrew and I managed to dirty every single plate, the good news is that our dear friends volunteered to help clear the table. I made my noises, blahblah, some listened, but others cleared and chatted away as the plates were carried into the kitchen. Guess what? The plates were scraped into the composting bin without me saying a word. Talk about fast learners, I mean, good friends.

Simplicity Can Work

I agree with Mary's comment  that we should be concerned about what we put on our skin, as well as what we put in our mouths. I ran my lotions and beauty potions through the Cosmetic Database (of doom). I discovered that it is highly likely that under one of those purple crime-scene lights I will glow a brilliant green.

Why are these products loaded with toxins we don't need? Do we really need all these ingredients to help us look and feel good? For years, people worldwide have used natural oils, such as olive, coconut, marula, and argan, as moisturizers and hair elixirs with great success. I'm not sure why we've moved so far away from simple. I'm just as guilty as the next person, until I travel, and then I use next to nothing. For instance, this past year, my family and I were on the move for five months. I took along a product we made using beeswax (from our beehives) and olive oil. It's a thick, rich balm.

It was exciting to use something made from only two ingredients (the fact that we made it was also key). Not to turn this into some sort of infomercial for our balm, but the Cosmetic Database has brought this all to mind so I feel like sharing. Our balm (so far I haven't read anything that says it wouldn't pass government regulators) works and, according to friends and family, its basic ingredients are working wonders. One friend used it to rid her baby of a small patch of eczema. Another shared it with a family member who is going through chemo; the simple ingredients are the only thing her ultra-sensitive, very dry skin can handle. Seasonal drying and cracking of skin around fingernails, heels, elbows, and lips have all been relieved by the balm. I'm tickled by the feedback. Simplicity works.


Which brings me back to my question: Why is it necessary to include so many ingredients (and if the Cosmetic Database is to be believed, so many toxic ingredients) in these beauty products? Shelf life? Antibacterial properties? I don't know. I just know that our little tins, containing two nontoxic ingredients, are showing results. Is all the extra stuff gimmick? And do we really need cleansers, toners, exfoliators, scrubs, and specific lotions for every body part before capping it all off with a collection of makeup products? When we think about what is good for our bodies (inside and out), the environment, and our wallets, it may be a good idea to step back and think about what we really need. Maybe if we did use fewer of these products we would be suffering from fewer allergies, skin problems, and the like, not to mention that our wallets would be fatter. I'm certainly guilty of falling for the claims—it happens every time I walk down a store's beauty aisle or flip through a magazine. I want my hair to be less frizzy and my skin to look like it did when I was 20. Fat chance. Yet, I know that, when I step away from it all and travel, my skin and hair tend to look pretty good. Of course, there was that one bus ride in Ecuador when I looked positively green, but that's another story.

RE-RE-RE-RE: The Decade to Come (Part 1)

(After Aretha Franklin’s “RESPECT”)

Probably enough has already been said in the media about the decade of EXcess now coming to a close. Instead of EXcoriating that EXecrable and EXcruciating period, my REsolution for the new decade is to REdedicate myself to RE-claiming the political, cultural, and personal high ground in an effort to REconceive our world and REshape our lives for our children and their children.

Please join me in REjecting the decade of EX and REplacing it with the decade of RE by adding your own REsolutions to the growing list below.

I REsolve that in the next decade I’m going to RE-RE-RE-RE-RE-RE

REduce:

• our consumption of plastic, especially bottles, bags, pre-packaged goods. 
• my weight, so after the holidays, it’s back to the South Beach Diet for awhile.

REfrain from:

• buying goods that have likely been shipped long distances by air or truck such as fruits and vegetables from Latin America, Florida, and California; shipments by ship are OK (e.g., olive oil from Italy) 
• accepting plastic bags from merchants; we need to be more vigilant about always having RE-usable sacks .  
• eating empty calories, especially those containing corn and refined sugar.
  

RE-use

• every plastic container that comes into our house, such as cottage cheese and yogurt containers, which we already use to freeze Therese’s excellent compost stocks and which we use at the homeless shelter (where we are overnight volunteers) to pack up left-overs for the guests lunch the next day.
• those damned blue New York Times home-delivery bags; currently, we use them to collect and transport unusable vegetable waste to our backyard compost bins before throwing them away in garbage, but in future we will try to RE-direct them to our friends/relatives who have dogs to use as pooper-scoopers. Although both these uses mean the bags ultimately go to a landfill, supposedly they are bio-degradable (a few months outdoors, 3 years in a landfill.
• our plastic freezer storage bags, which we currently RE-use in the freezer until they are no longer airtight at which point we RE-use them whenever we buy produce, including at: our local Greenmarket and the Park Slope Co-op.
• all other transparent plastic bags, which we already use to bag recyclable paper and/or metal, plastic, and glass per the NYC Sept of Sanitation rules.
• all opaque plastic bags that we’ve gotten from merchants who don’t provide paper bags when we’ve forgotten our reusable sacks; currently we use them as garbage bags (so we don’t have to buy plastic garbage bags) and to put out RE-turnable bottles for trash scavengers to take to REdemption centers. (Yes, I know trash scavenging is illegal, but here in NYC it’s a fact of life, and putting out the REturnables seems to dissuade these scavengers from going through one’s trash.

Stay tuned for more REsolutions.

The Pleasures of Urban Living

I'm fairly certain that if my husband had not gotten together with me when he did (his early fifties, after splitting up from a long marriage), he would have moved back to the Vermont or perhaps Connecticut country. Even though he was born in Manhattan, Peter is not, at heart, a city guy.

I, on the other hand, am a city girl. (My friend Maggie once gave me one of the greatest compliment of my life: she said that even though I'm not originally from New York, I was "a New Yorker waiting to happen.") I love the art and culture and diversity and the food! And I love being the only white person on my subway car. (I should say here, because I can hear his protest, that Peter loves these things too; but there's a city temperament that I possess and a country temperament that he has, and they are just not the same thing.)

We moved from the upper west side of Manhattan to Brooklyn in 2002. I wasn't sure I was going to like it. I loved where we lived, but the landlord would just do these crazy rent hikes on us, and I agreed that we should buy a house in Brooklyn, which seemed like a compromise between Manhattan and the country. People would ask me: Do you miss Manhattan? I did -- for about 40 seconds. And then I became a Brooklyn convert.

We have the diversity of an international city and the luxury of having a garden. What could be more perfect?

But, here's where Brooklyn (at least, my little corner of it, called Windsor Terrace) has failed me: no good neighborhood restaurants or bars. Oh, wait. Let me reclaim that statement a bit. We have a fabulous Dominican/Mexican restaurant on our corner, Elora's, that I hope will never ever ever go away. But that -- until lately -- has been it.

The other week, Peter and I were coming back from a long walk in Manhattan and I said, "My life would complete if we had a really good neighborhood bar." We came up from the subway and there on Prospect Park West Avenue (what we refer to as "Main Street") was a brand new bar: The Double Windsor. They sell fabulous and diverse beers on tap. And it's cozy and it's not some place where females or people of color would feel out of place (which describes the other bars in my neighborhood).

Then, just last week, Peter comes home with a menu for the newest restaurant in our neighborhood: a French bistro!!!!!! Have I died and gone to heaven?

Today we had a just about perfect urban Sunday: the Times and coffee and Don't Cry Over Sour Milk Apple Cake for breakfast (even thought they left out the magazine section when they delivered the paper, grrr!); a little bit of work for me on my magazine and Peter in the garden; then a long six-mile walk from our house through several Brooklyn neighborhoods (where we stumbled upon a craft fair and I bought some beautiful earrings), across the Brooklyn Bridge, to Washington Square Park (where we attended a Meditate New York event at Judson Church); then on the subway back to our neighborhood, where we had a beer at the Double Windsor and ate at the new French bistro (Le P'tit Paris). Mussels and a hangar steak and a lovely conversation with our sweet waiter who is newly imported from Sacramento CA (one our favorite cities in California; he was so delighted we knew it).

I love this city. I love my life.

The Zen of Hanging Out the Laundry

It's been 50 years since I first read T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," as a callow youth in my high school A.P. English class, but much of it resonates with me today, as I lead my retirement life, far more than it did then. One line, in particular, came back to me this morning, as I noticed my thoughts while hanging out the week's laundry in our backyard:

"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons."

Hanging out the laundry has become almost a meditation for me. As I carry out this nearly mindless activity, my mind wanders and I follow that wandering with interest, noticing where it takes me. Today, I noticed that, as I often do after I've hung all the laundry, I was counting how many of my T-shirts and underpants I'd hung out, in this case, it was seven of each. Usually when I do this, I remark (to myself) on how many days it's been since we last did our laundry, but this morning, I found myself instead thinking that a week of my life had passed since I'd last hung out the laundry. From there my mind went to the line from J. Alfred Prufrock and I thought: am I measuring out my life with laundry loads?

Perhaps. For years, I've experienced a similar feeling of time passing every Fall and Spring when switching out storm windows and screens: "Another spring is here and a winter gone; didn't I just do this? Has it really been six months?"

Ironically, I've never really experienced the passage of time on those official occasions when we note them: birthdays and anniversaries. No, it's these periodic details of everyday life that seem to remind me that my life is passing.

On a more practical note: weather permitting, we actually hang out our laundry throughout the year, even on dry, sunny winter days. As the laundry hamper begins to fill, we check out the next few days' forecast and if it looks like we're going to have a mostly sunny day with a low likelihood of precipitation, we plan to do a laundry on that day. TIP: We actually hang our socks on an indoor drying rack, which is less time-consuming than pinning each sock on a clothes line. This has the added benefit of making it easier to match pairs and spot that a sock has "gone missing" and search for it right then and there.

We take great satisfaction in using solar and wind energy to dry our laundry instead of using our gas-dryer. (See The Clothesline Revolution.) And, I appreciate the opportunity to meditate, noticing where my mind takes me at these peaceful and otherwise mindless times.

What the heck is urbal tea?

A little over a year ago, I started compiling a list called "Why Bother?" which attempted to chronicle all the things--both big and small--my husband, Peter, and I were doing in our Brooklyn home to try to counteract what seemed like the inexorable destruction of the planet.

I called the list "Why Bother?" both to acknowledge the helplessness I felt, and to provide a response to those feelings. As post-middle aged people (Peter retired in 2007; I have a few years left to work, if I could find some!), we made it a priority to redefine how to live in the world, if only for the sake of our grandchildren.

My friend Louise, who at the time was working with me on a magazine start-up (that crashed and burned soon after the October 2008 market collapse), talked about these issues with me all the time. She and her husband, Andrew, come at these questions from a different perspective: they live on a family farm in rural Virginia and raise two school-aged children, Graham and Katharine.

But despite our urban-rural and age differences, we share common interests: serious travel (last year Peter and I took a four-month trip to Australia and New Zealand, while Louise and Andrew took their kids out of school for the year and spent half of it living and traveling in South America); serious gardening (even though we have a postage stamp back yard and they live on a farm); and serious cooking (not fancy but principled). We also share common values: respect for the Earth; a love of culture and cultural differences; a respect for the (well) written word; a belief in the common good.

Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand

Over the years I've pulled Louise into my work projects, which tend to focus on technology in education. And while it's a perfectly respectable topic and she doesn't turn down the work, she keeps asking me: Can't you get on a magazine that covers gardening or travel or cooking? I wish.

Well, why wish? Fact is, the economics of publishing today mean that we're never going to start our own traditional magazine (if Conde Nast had to close Gourmet, there's no hope for any of us). But why let that keep us back from writing on the things that we feel passionately about? Andrew, who is by far the cleverest of the four of us (but don't tell him I said so), came up with the name of the blog. Urb[an] [rur]al Tea [a blend, where city meets country]. (Or, as he says, "If you have to be so literal, you don't deserve the title.")

I promised I'd write the first entry—and I admit that it's a little serious, but it's hard to get something started with the exact right tone. (I predict that Louise and Andrew will be smart-ass funny, Peter will be deadly serious, and I'll try to be funny and only sometimes succeed.)

The intent is to share the ways we're trying to figure out how to live responsibly and take pride of ownership, at least, of the small patch of Earth we're given the privilege to inhabit. It's a conversation we invite you to join.

Peter in our Brookyn garden

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