Trying to solve problems like Maria

I’ve rapidly become a treehugger. I don’t know when it really started, I saw An Inconvenient Truth last year and while it opened my eyes to some things, 90% of my attitude remained like “This doesn’t apply to me ’cause I don’t even have a car and I’m not a giant corporation”. It’s one of the reasons New Yorkers feel superior to people – since we live in a city where rent sucks us dry, we can’t afford cars therefore we are automatically slightly more green than you. But somehow in the past month or so I started to get really freaky about stuff. First off, Martha Stewart has a newish magazine called Bluelines, it’s sort of like Martha for the under-30 crowd — people who like to be crafty but not to the point where we are going to sculpt marzipan chess pieces for a Searching For Bobby Fischer themed party. There was a section in there this month called 100 reasons to get rid of it which has turned into a fun project for me. So far I have donated 5 old pairs of glasses and sunglasses to some needy possible diamond miners in Sierra Leone (uniteforsight.org), I gave all my Continental airline miles to HeroMiles because it’s for a good cause and also, when do I ever fly Continental, and I’m sending all my old towels to Cap4pets.org so that some pup doesn’t catch a chill after getting out of the tub. There are also sites that can tell you how to get rid of old furniture, dvds, cars, cell phones, whatever. I know the point of Martha’s article is more about getting rid of clutter but it’s also about not just throwing stuff in the trash because your trash is some homeless puppy’s treasure. See? I don’t know what happened, I am all sentimental about the Earth and crap. I’m sorry I made fun of you in college, devil-sticking, dreadlocked hippies.

Oprah also had an Earth Day special with tips to live greener and you know that when Opes speaks, middle aged ladies and gay men of all ages listen. I’m not going to list all of Oprah’s suggestions because seriously, 90% of people I know already watch the show, but one tip that I didn’t even think to do before was to opt not to print an ATM receipt. If everyone did that, Oprah gave one of those statistics about how we’d save a roll of paper that would stretch from earth to the moon and then 9 times around the equator of the moon and then back and then also there would be enough left over for the world’s fattest man to make a belt. So that’s a lot of paper we can save. Finally, did anyone else notice that Matt Damon looked a little beat on that episode of Oprah? I might be out to save the earth now but I still think celebs should not overlook the importance of concealer and/or catnaps. (That doesn’t change the fact that I loved The Depahted!) In closing, please make an effort to save the earth. As Will Hunting may or may not have said, Reduce, Reuse and Don’t Be Retahdid.