guys like dolls

Two quick things:

1) I’ve been slowly working my way through Ken Burns’ history of the National Parks. It really drives home the point that we have an insatiable urge for the planet’s resources and that without extraordinary (and usually unpopular at the time) protection, more land and animals would go the way of the passenger pigeon. Also a cool tidbit: all of the National Monuments that you see on the map are the result of the Antiquities Act, which helped to (mostly) protect the Grand Canyon when Congress wouldn’t act. I wish that the film could be compressed down to an hour so that it would be more accessible/widely watched because it really puts things into perspective.

2) I’m on Google Books!

Around 4 or 5 weeks ago I ran into this blog mnmlist and discovered something amazing – I needed less stuff. And so began the process of removing things from my life – both physical objects and tasks that I thought I needed to do but really don’t.

If you were to explore our house now some of the changes might seems strange but others you wouldn’t notice at all. We no longer have a bed frame, that seems big, but it makes so much sense for us. We aren’t old, so we don’t need the bed to be higher up. We don’t have a mice or bug infested house, so we don’t need any space between the ground and us. And on the up side, I don’t have to clean all that dust that ended up under the bed and was so hard to reach with the vacuum anymore! Our bedroom feels so much bigger now, because the frame isn’t taking up all that space.

I’ve also gone through a ton of my clothes, and I no longer have a dresser. Everything I own is either hanging up or stashed in 3 bins (socks, underwear, other non hanging etc). So far this has been fantastic. The closet is much more open, I wear every single one of my clothes constantly, and it’s made line drying and veganism a lot easier (but I’ll save that for another post).

Other stuff is less noticeable. I got rid of the mac mini which was hooked up to the tv, making it harder – on purpose – for me to watch hulu. Bookshelves, rugs, pillows, extra extra blankets, unused kitchen gadgets, unused old hobby materials, and knickknacks have all gone. In general, I no longer lose anything in the house. There just isn’t anywhere for it to go. The closets are fairly empty and everything has a place (everything had a place before too I suppose, but now it has a place with lots of space around it!) I’ve gotten rid of so many useless items, clutter that just builds up over time until you don’t even remember why you have it.

I’ve also given away almost all of my books. It isn’t very likely that I’m going to re-read them, and it’s better for someone else to enjoy them than it is for me to hold onto them. I think that is in general my new philosophy. I wasn’t using my sewing machine, and in fact, I’m probably never going to use it. By giving it away to someone who will use it, it’s possible for there to be one less sewing machine in the world. And if I ever really need a sewing machine (and can’t use a tailor or sew it by hand for whatever reason) then it would be better for me to try and borrow one – or even watch craigslist or freecycle for a machine and then donate it back to the free pool when I’m done.

We’ve been doing this with moving boxes for years – buy them for $50 off craigslist, sell them for $50 when you are done. Why can’t we do it with more things? You wouldn’t hold onto those moving boxes the whole time you weren’t using them, so why would you hold onto that sewing machine. “Just in case” isn’t a good enough reason for me anymore. I’m trying to only keep that which I use regularly. And through this process I’ve come to just need less. The desire for things simply fades away. What you have right now is good enough.

It isn’t just the house that minimalizes though, it’s things on your todo list as well. I’ve allowed myself to cross off items that don’t really need to get done and were just causing me stress. By getting rid of so much stuff the house is also much easier to clean, and I already mentioned that I don’t lose anything anymore. (In fact, I have a text document which lists every single thing we own and what room it’s in – yeah, I’m a little ocd… but that isn’t necessary for minimalism to work!) I also don’t have a smart phone anymore. I don’t check my email constantly, I don’t feel a need to read the news all the time, and I don’t miss it one bit. It’s nice to be detached. To sit and do nothing. Especially with the dog, she’s great at keeping me company.

I’m by no means done. Every week I seem to find more things that I don’t need or something I no longer need to do. Or sometimes I find another way to do things which allows me to get rid of something else. This has freed up a lot of time for me to do better things – like starting a new blog, helping a friend with a website, and just kicking it.

Overall, life just seems easier, calmer, better.

For Christmas, Joey got me a pair of Vibram FiveFingers shoes. They are amazing. I know many people have said that, but it’s true. For me, it just makes running more fun, and more difficult – both of which I enjoy.

The difficult part starts with your calves. At first, running even around the block is tough. I was sore for a week after my first run, and I didn’t think my calves were that weak to start with! This is mostly because your heels don’t touch the ground as much when compared to running with regular shoes. It’s sort of like doing calf raises the entire time. I think of this as a bonus – in the same amount of time as my non-fivefingers runs I’m getting more of a workout. Brilliant.

My calves are fairly buff now so I’m able to run longer distances more often. This has brought on the next stage of blisters and calluses. For me, I guess my toes weren’t strong enough, so my blisters are all centered there. My big toes in particular are now much thicker than they used to be. It doesn’t help that these days I’m running mostly on concrete, which is pretty rough. (Note: The main reason I’m running on concrete is that the one downside of these shoes is their lack of insulation. It is still too cold outside to go on long trail hikes. It’s warming up quickly though!) I suppose if you were able to run on trails all the time, you might be able to avoid blisters, but I feel like I’m just preparing my feet for real barefoot running.

Most importantly though, monkey shoes (Joey’s name for them, rather fitting) make running fun again. I feel more agile, bouncy even. It’s fun to feel the grass or twigs or bumps on the ground. Fun to just have more sensation. And I’m really excited to use them for backpacking. I have sandles for crossing streams, but these will be much better – easier to balance with on the rocks and I can even continue walking in them until they are dry.

I love my shoes so much that I had Joey get them too. They are just that good.

I just saw The Cove this weekend, and it was a very well done movie. The plot is thrilling, the animals are easy to like, and the antagonists are easy to gang up on.

However, the movie really saddens me. It’s so easy to attack someone else’s culture and habits, while avoiding your own issues. The movie derides the Japanese for saying that hunting dolphins is part of their culture – but you could easily turn that back on Americans and ask us why we torture cows, chickens, and pigs.

For every dolphin that that is killed in Japan, 365,000 chickens are slaughtered in the US every year (9,000,000,000 vs. 23,000). And I’m not saying that killing dolphins should be ignored, but you shouldn’t throw stones in a glass house. I wish the movie had been made about one of the three species we really torture here. I wish it had been closer to home.

People will get excited about this cause, support it, and change absolutely none of their personal habits. I was sitting next to someone who was appalled at the movie but will continue to eat fish, not even considering all other meat. He couldn’t see the connection. It is easy to get excited and go to Japan and be an activist – and much harder to simply reduce the quantity of meat you consume. There are celebrities involved! and beaches! There is a lot of glamour and no sacrifice required.

I’m glad dolphins are getting a champion, but who gets to draw the line between which animals are sacred and which aren’t?

I’ve picked up on minimalism lately and because of that I’ve been going through old papers and mementos and either scanning or trashing them. In the process I ran across that Google flyer as well as this sticker I made. The design was originally for the Daily Cal – another funny adventure.

The first time I went to the Daily Cal office was because of my first freshman roommate, Amelia. She liked to write and had started going to the office the first week of school. I was up for anything that first semester, so I decided to go with her after a while and see what it was like. (In high school I had been EIC and Design Editor for the yearbook, so a newspaper wasn’t that foreign)

It turns out that they actually paid you to do design work, fantastical, so I took my first college job. The Daily Cal was a little crazy… it takes a lot of time and is definitely a labor of love, especially for the writers. They would work on an article for 8 hours or something and maybe get paid $10 for it.

So I got immersed in the atmosphere and during my 3 years of school was a designer (layout text/pictures in software), then design editor (same but in charge of schedule/making sure layouts are consistent), then did some production (the night job, last design tweaks and fix and major issues once everyone else is asleep) and finally was the production manager (in charge of production).

The production job was the most fun, and the most painful. You were in charge of sending all of the final layouts to the printer and making sure there weren’t any software glitches. It might also involve redoing layouts if stories changed late at night and the designers had already gone home. My memory is sketchy, but I think I would typically work 3 nights a week from 6pm till around 12-2am depending on what kind of night it was.

The fun part was the thrill of not knowing what was going to happen. I also did a lot of homework because there was a ton of downtime. The pain was waiting on those nights when you wanted to go home early and always ended at 2am. I got paid by the hour, one of the few jobs like that on staff, and few people have the skills/interest needed, so it worked out nicely for me.

Anyway, the sticker came from my design days. The business manager of the Daily Cal (one of the few adults) wanted to do some recycling promos and asked me to mock some stuff up. (I made extra money on the side sometimes doing this). I’ve always thought most recycling stickers are extremely boring so I made a couple variations with a grunge theme. (I drew that campanile and a sather gate by hand.) I didn’t even use that text! It was more mild, “Recycle because it’s good for the planet” or some such boringness. It was still rejected, but Joey liked it. He came up with the slogan above, “Recycle or I’ll Burn Your House Down”, so I printed a few stickers just for him for Christmas. Such a simple ending, but it evokes a lot of memories.

Isn’t it fun to reminisce?

I never actually meant to work at Google. I was applying for grad school when I was handed this flyer on campus:

I was pretty cocky back then, so I took my resume and emailed it to requested address with a subject of “I think I have a big brain”. (Little did I know that ATS – the candidate tracking system – is automated and does not care what the email said.) 2 phone screens later I was invited on campus, and still didn’t care if I was offered a job because Mountain View was pretty far from Berkeley (ie Joey) and as most of you know, I don’t drive.

The campus interview was amusing. Joey dropped me off very early in the morning and I actually went to the wrong building. (B42 instead of B40 – this was also back when we had much tighter security and I was questioned to death about why I was even there) I was sitting next to these other interviewees who were really old (ie not inexperienced new grads) and I felt out of place and slightly frightened. No one there knew what to do with me.

Then, magic happened. I was picked up by some recruiter and taken over to the new grads place, and it was wonderful! There were donuts and swag! Everybody was just milling around and talking! Smiling and friendly! I felt so much better. We each had 3 interviews and then it was off to lunch and a tour! This was all still just for fun until someone mentioned shuttles. Apparently a shuttle had just started from east bay to campus and I was suddenly much more interested in working.

The process at Google tends to take forever, and I actually cared now that there was a shuttle, so I was waiting on pins and needles. And – funnily enough, my hands and legs started feeling like pins and needles too! And I had to go back for my second neck surgery on April 1.

The timing of everything gets fuzzy in my last semester of senior year, but Google sent me an offer, and I thought it was pretty amazing to actually be offered real money. I took a while to accept and in the meantime they sent me a basket of flavored popcorn, and another bucket of candy. When I did accept they sent me an ipod – I almost swooned. I had so little money then that when my macbook hard drive died I actually booted off that ipod for a while.

I had the surgery, moved with Joey to Oakland, and started taking the shuttle every day to work. Almost 5 years later, I’m still there and it’s all because of a funny flyer.

I don’t wear makeup.

Actually, I haven’t worn makeup for a while – I gave away everything I owned about 2 months ago – I just felt funny telling anyone, and then I felt funny for feeling funny about telling anyone. It reminds me of this article.

I haven’t been wearing makeup during the day for at least 8 years, but now I no longer wear it to dress up either. I watched the movie America the Beautiful and it really made me realize that makeup is silly. All the women (and men) are just competing against each other, each trying to outdo the rest with more and more makeup. If I start wearing makeup in high school, then you will feel pressured to start in junior high. If I wear makeup on special occasions, then you’ll need to start wearing it every day.

And then there is just the overall impression that you aren’t pretty enough. No matter what. You must wear makeup in order to fit in. Everyone does it. Shouldn’t we just appreciate people as they are?

I think you can be beautiful without putting anything on your face. and there are so many benefits – it feels nicer, you don’t have to worry about it getting messed up, your skin stays cleaner, and you don’t have to spend all this time and effort on something that isn’t worth it.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m still vain in many ways. I like to do my hair, and put on nice clothes. It will take time to get past the social pressure, but I just think everyone would be better off with less makeup in the world. And if the makeup succeeds… it’s just going to get messed up anyway.

I know some people will never give up the stuff, but I’ve stopped, and it isn’t due to lack of caring, lack of knowledge, or any other lack that I do not wear makeup. I’ve made a conscious decision.

I like to store many of my pantry items in clear containers – sugar, flour, cornmeal, anything that comes in messy bags. I feel like they make my cabinets more organized, I can easily see how much of something I have left, and, I confess, I like how they look.

Unfortunately, most of the pantry storage containers out there are plastic. And a lot of the best are clear hard plastic. The kind which used to have BPA in them, and now probably contain other chemicals we don’t yet know are harmful. To me, the best replacement for these containers is glass. But finding glass storage is fairly hard – most of them don’t seal well and are much more expensive than plastic.

But I’ve now rediscovered canning jars! I already use the small jars for canning pickles and jams, but I didn’t realize that the jars also come in quarts and half gallons. The half gallons are perfect for white sugar and flour (I use two for a 5lb bag of flour) and the quarts also store my smaller brown and powdered sugars very nicely. The jars are only about $1-2 per piece (cheaper than any of the plastic containers I’ve used) and they seal very well. Because of their cheap price, I bought several wide mouth sets, so now everything is bottled up and their lids are all interchangeable. You can get them from Osh or Ace Hardware. The best pantry food storage was right in front of me this whole time.

My company recently started this financial education push at work. They are offering classes, reading materials and we also got access to some will making software. My finances are fairly well organized, but I hadn’t ever thought about making a will. It didn’t seem like it would hurt though so I decided to give it a shot.

After a bunch of reading online I ended up with two documents. One is called a Living Will and is really easy to make at doyourproxy.org. It applies while you are still alive, hence the name. You basically choose from several sets of radio buttons about what you want to happen when you are no longer able to make your own medical decisions. Things like, if you are in a coma with no hope of coming out, do you want life support to be stopped or continue? Or, do you have a problem with artificial feeding? It took some hard thinking for me to figure out my own answers, but I feel more confident that my family members will know what I believe and their choices will be easier to make. (In the end, I really think that wills are for the benefit of your family – not yourself)

I made my actual Will using some software by Suze Orman that I got through work. It was sightly painful to use, but only costs about $15, which is much cheaper than a lawyer. I don’t think you could use it for very complicated wills but I was able to set up two in about an hour (Joey and I have separate ones because joint wills can be very problematic. A joint will can’t be changed after one person dies – no matter how out of date it gets.) The main point of the will is to name an executor, and to leave your tangible property (possessions without a title) and the residue of your estate (all money, houses, other titled objects) to someone.

The executor will carry out your will and has to go through all of your stuff and get it to the right people or places. So you want someone who can handle all of that work and that you trust. Trust is important because you can include additional notes with your will that tell your executor what kind of funeral services you like and can call out specific property you want left to people. The benefit of this “Final Instructions” document is that can be updated frequently and easily because it doesn’t need to be signed – it isn’t really a legal document, you are just asking your executor to take care of some things for you in the way you wish. For now, I chose my Mom. I know I can trust her to give our cats and dog to the right people and carry out my funeral services in the way I wish.

The whole process took about a day of thinking, researching, and deciding. Once we figured out what we wanted the wills to say it was pretty easy to execute using the two web apps. After generating the documents we printed one hard copy because they need some signatures. The Living Will needs to be signed by two people who are unrelated to you (we used our neighbors) and your Will also needs two signatures, but they can be related. Neither document needs to be notarized (at least in CA) – which I didn’t want to have to deal with. After getting the signatures, I scanned everything back in and sent electronic copies to a couple of people for safe keeping. And most importantly, I sent a hard copy to my executor so that if the time came, they would be able to act.

For a day of work I think I probably saved my family weeks of painful decision making. So, even though I usually try to pretend death doesn’t exist, I think the one day was worth it.

Lately I’ve been trying to reduce our trash output. Just generally making switches from disposable to reusable. One of the things I decided to try was using handkerchiefs instead of kleenex. I’ve decided that I’m never going back.

The first thought I had was that handkerchiefs might be gross, or take too much time, or something like that. I don’t know anyone else who uses them. Instead though, they have saved me money (I used to go through a lot of kleenex) and they feel good!

There were two kinds two choose from, synthetic or cotton. I got some of both from Amazon to see which ones I liked best. The synthetic ones are really easy to fold and don’t wrinkle at all, so they look nicer in their box. The cotton ones crumple up, which I could probably fix with ironing, but I’m too lazy for that. The cotton ones are cotton though, so they are more natural (but I couldn’t find a good set of organic ones). Both sets were around a $1 per piece. It seems to be a mixed bag, so I like having some of both.

I pretty much use them just like I used paper tissues except when they are dirty I toss them on top of (or in) the washer instead of in the trash. Then, whenever I do a load of regular laundry they just get cleaned as well, so it hasn’t taken any extra effort nor cost to use them. And they haven’t been gross at all, especially when I just toss them inside of the washer itself. No touching of other people’s handkerchiefs is necessary.

My nose also likes them because they are softer and thicker than the paper version.

I still have one box of tissues in the closet that I can pull out for guests if necessary, but you should definitely try them in your own home. They aren’t just for old men anymore.