paige-greene

I need How to be a Liberal in a House Full of Right-Wing Ultra-Conservatives 101.

Also I need to make a list of music NOT to listen to when I’m sad, e.g. Skinny Love and Stairway to Heaven and Hurt.

“He can’t be a man ‘cause he don’t smoke the same cigarettes as me.”

— “Satisfaction”, The Rolling Stones.

This line totally just jumped out at me. I love this song. Really do. It’s a classic song and I’ve known all the words since I was little. But I only really listened to it today and this line got all up in my face.

Is this really all it boils down to? Are we, as humans, so Hell-bent on dehumanizing and objectifying others that we’ll resort not only to using the color of another’s skin as basis for judgment, but even something so petty as what kind of cigarette he smokes?

I find and am ashamed that I can be guilty of this. In a place where ignorance and prejudice runs rampantly, I pride myself on being, in the words of my mother, “liberal” and “radically open-minded”. I don’t get scared when I hear somebody speaking a non-English language in the grocery store. Whenever I find out that somebody is openly gay, I don’t become immediately afraid that some chick is going to come on to me or that some dude is going to hit on my brother. I study other cultures and beliefs religiously (excuse my pun).

But sometimes I make fun of people for behaving differently than I do.

Take my friend Valerie, for example. Valerie is relatively and almost stereotypically a normal girl. She goes to church every Sunday and comes to school on the weekdays and can’t wait for it to be summer. However, I recently noticed while sitting with her at lunch that she chews weirdly. She makes pouty faces and pushes her lips up when she eats. One day she was making a really funny-looking face and I laughed and pointed out to her that she doesn’t “chew normally”. She laughed too and we carried on with our lunch, making jokes about what had happened to us that day and days before and just being friends.

Thinking back, I have to wonder who I am to decide what is “normal chewing”. I’ve seen myself eat. Sometimes it’s not a pretty sight. I’ve seen and was surprised to find some people that eatreally attractively.Everybody chews differently and that’s okay. And it’s okay that I laugh with my friends about our little quirks and weird habits and such. But really, who am I to say what is normal when, in fact, I claim and believe wholeheartedly that there is no such thing as normal, that we are all extremely bizarre but some of us are better at hiding it?

Sometimes it really bothers me when other people make comments about my normalcy, or rather lack thereof. I’m about to shock you. Ready for this?

I don’t like french fries. At all.

OR APPLE PIE.

There. I’ve said it.

Why is it such a big deal for me to admit this? Because when I tell people this, they gasp and say things like, “That’s so un-American.” Or, “That’s weird. EVERYBODY likes french fries/apple pie.”

omg shut up. obviously, “everybody” does not like french fries/apple pie. i am also a person and i think i should be included in something so all-inclusive thanks.

That’s just a little hypocritical, though. I can sit there and tell Valerie that the way she chews is weird but I don’t like it when people point out that my taste buds differ from the majority of the population? Hypocritical.

It’s not really a big deal except that this is how racism and other prejudices begin, isn’t it? We think, oh, that person’s skin is so much darker than mine, or his religion is SO different from mine, and at first we just think it the way I think Valerie’s chewing is weird. It’s initially harmless. And then we let those differences grow until they wedge between us and a certain minority and we begin to dislike or even hate them because of those differences. One day, if all of the weird chewers group together and form a sect or something, I might hate them for it because PUSHING YOUR LIPS UP INSTEAD OF DOWN WHEN YOU CHEW IS NOT HUMAN YOU GUYS.

Okay, I won’t. That would be ridiculous and because I know this I am not going to hate them for it. But hypothetically, I could.

Alright. I’m done with my crazy circle of ideas. Now, back to listening to awesome music that nobody else my age likes.

1. Conservation of Fossil fuel. It takes 78 calories of fossil fuel to produce 1 calorie of beef protein; 35 calories for 1 calorie of pork; 22 calories for 1 of poultry; but just 1 calorie of fossil fuel for 1 calorie of soybeans. By eating plant foods instead of animal foods, I help conserve our non-renewable sources of energy.

—“49 Reasons Why I Am A Vegetarian”, www.britishmeat.com

Reason #1 for being a vegetarian seems pretty awesome to me. As we all know, fossil fuels are irreplaceable, and yet we seem to depend on it for everything. Most knowledgeable human beings are aware that we use fossil fuels to generate power for our modes of transportation, most of our heat sources, and the manufacturing of many plastic items that we use everyday. This is common knowledge. However, it has not occurred to me in the past thatwe even depend on fossil fuels to produce our food.

As of data provided in 1994, 400 gallons of oil equivalents are used in the production of one American’s food in the course of a year. Agricultural energy consumption is broken down as follows:

• 31%- the manufacturing of inorganic fertilizer
• 19%- the operation of field machinery
• 16%- transportation
• 13%- irrigation
• 8%- raising livestock (not including livestock feed)
• 5%- crop drying
• 5%- pesticide production
• 8%- miscellaneous     
  

 Quite frankly, this scares the crap out of me. That is a hell of a lot of fossil fuels, and that doesn’t even include the costs of energy used for packaging, refrigeration, transportation to retail outlets, and household cooking.AND THAT WAS 1994.While scientists have been working on ways in which we don’t have to rely so much on fossil fuels, there hasn’t been much success and the few changes that have been made haven’t as widespread as one would hope. Add to that the facts that, 1, our consumption of fossil fuels has nearly doubled every 20 years since 1900, 2, the shocking percentage of obese Americans is much higher than it was 20 years ago, and 3, the human population is expanding exponentially, and it gets pretty damn scary.

Sure,technicallyfossil fuels are renewable. If we wait long enough, more coal and oil and natural gas will be formed. But that would mean waiting for millions of years longer than humans have been around. And if we don’t figure out how to survive without completely using up these resources, we’re going to be left in the cold (no pun intended) one day when we’ve simply run out.

It takes 78 times as many calories of fossil fuel to produce a calorie of beef protein as it does a calorie of soybeans. Think of all the oil/coal/gas you’d be saving just  by giving up red meat; the conservation would continue if you gave up pork and poultry, as well!

I need to get out of my own damn head. I mean I am so self-absorbed and sad and I could have it so much worse.

And then I go and make a fool of myself when I get out of it so I crawl right the hell back in.