To hear you tell it
you can’t stomach the day
the light too much
for your eyes
when it touches on something
truly sickening.
the heat gets at you
and pricks your skin
like needles
or a loving touch.
the flies, the crowds
and above all
that omnipresent sun
forcing itself on a blue sky
that, like your face,
keeps turning back
to the night.

What exactly are you trying to tell me, iPod Shuffle?

My drive home from work tonight was accompanied by a soundtrack handpicked by fate:
Heathcliff – Diva Destruction
Rocketship – Taxiride
Nothing’s Impossible – Depeche Mode

I approached the universe with open hands, offering up my heart & soul for a sign, some sort of direction, an illumination of the path to take.

Be careful what you ask for, right?

Look outside, I know that you’ll recognise that it’s summertime

You may spend weeks and months gazing at dreary grey skies and bare brown branches, desperately hoping for change, waiting to see the days get brighter again.

They always will. Spring and rebirth always come back, the light will elongate, we will reach for the sun, desperate for its love.

My new hood, a promising place to emerge, phoenix-like, from the ashes.

Hemp: not just for hippies anymore

Last week, I was running low on face wash & moisturiser. I was using a Dove moisturiser and a Biore face wash, the latter of which I was fairly happy with upon finding out that they’re not tested on animals & the glycerin it contains is of non-animal origin. However, after expanding my concerns from animal welfare to the environment in general, I couldn’t keep buying either of these products. They’re full of chemicals which I can’t even pronounce, which I feel is a bad sign. If you can’t pronounce it, don’t eat/drink/smoke/use it. Plus, both come in plastic containers, which are marked with the resin identification code 2 and HDPE: high-density polyethylene. It doesn’t carry the known health risks of plastics like PVC or those containing BPA, and is recycleable, but the fact still remains that in terms of raw material and energy, 1.75kg of petroleum is required to make 1kg of this plastic. I can’t even find information on how much of that would be recycled, but I’m willing to bet it would be a smaller amount still. Remember, recycling is actually downcycling: the plastic bottles you recycle don’t go on to become more plastic bottles.

Anyway, I was charged with finding products for my extremely simple skincare regime which filled the following criteria:
x vegan
x not tested on animals
x organic
x with minimal plastic packaging/ packaging that is easily reusable (the saying “reduce, reuse and recycle” is in that order for a reason)
x not too expensive
x generally producing as small a negative impact on the world as possible.

Enter the hemp store at my local shopping mall. Hemp grows in a few months, doesn’t require chemical pesticides, and needs a fraction of the water that cotton does. Additionally, hemp seeds are basically bursting with goodness, full of essential fats and protein. The presence of these fats is what makes hemp seed oil products so great for your skin: it’s nourishing it with exactly what it needs and without any chemicals.

I bought two bars of hemp oil soap, for face wash, one lavender scented for night when I night to calm doon and one lemongrass scented for when I need invigoration in the morning. Each came with a strip of plasticky-paper stuck around the middle, which sucks because it could have easily been recycled card. There are only seven ingredients: organic Australian hemp seed oil, Orangutan friendly palm oil & palm kernel oil, vegetable glycerine, natural sea salt, vitamin E, natural organic colour, lemon grass essential oil, which sound pretty good to me. You?

I also bought some face cream which is slightly less pleasing. It’s in a glass jar with a tin lid & a plastic insert under the lid, so the packaging isn’t too bad as I can easily repurpose it, or failing that recycle most of it. The ingredients are slightly more disconcerting. I read somewhere that a good idea is to stick to as few ingredients as possible, with twelve ingredients and six flavours of essential oil (which does make it smell really delicious, a tiny bit minty and a bit citrus-y and quite zesty and invigorating). There are three ingredients which have warning levels of 0-2 on Cosmetics Database, which is again not ideal but a lot better than the Dove moisturiser which got an overall score of 7.

You may not care, and are just happy to have found something to do the good work on your skin. Well, as actual products, the soap and the moisturiser are both great. The soap makes my skin all soft and tingly, if a little stretched-feeling (though I get this whenever I wash my face with anything other than water), and the moisturiser makes my skin even softer & smell nice. I’ve even noticed that a scar I had from a zit that I kept hassling (Hi, I’m Kendal and I’m a picker D:) has faded in the week since I started using the new products. The moisturiser does feel a little thick when you put it on, but if you wait a few moments for it to dry & then rub your face gently, you’ll love how soft & smooth your skin feels.

This post is part of a new theme in my life, namely, putting my money where my mouth is. I’ve signed Big Green Purse’s One In A Million Campaign, which wants to get a million women using their incredible spending power (we spend 85c of each dollar, apparently) for the good of the planet, through spending $1,000 on things like organic food, natural cosmetics and fuel-efficient goods instead of what they would usually buy. I’m $23.76 closer to my thousand, and looking forward to more shopping to save the world :)

ETA: some pictures from the website of the company (a little family owned one in Victoria, aww!), G.R.E.E.N. Hemp of what I bought, as well as to say that I am taking a leaf (or scale?) out of Beth’s book and emailing the company to praise & ask about the soap wrapper. I’ll let you know what the reply is!

No Impact Man is having a big impact on me.

I’m almost finished catching up on the Fake Plastic Fish archives, and at the beginning of this month, Beth posted an interview with No Impact Man. No Impact Man is Colin Beavan, who initially decided to go for a year making no/little environmental impact. Whilst living in a New York apartment with his family (which brought imaginable difficulties to his goal). This year-long project has evolved into a new lifestyle for Beavan, a book and a movie based on his experience.

Getting back to the interview, it is hitting me deeply that a lot of what Beavan says in regards to efforts to help the earth can also be applied to people struggling with anything overwhelming in their lives (me personally? Mental illness & university). My emphasis in bold.

So, we have to accept that the problem is overwhelming and immense and at the same time just get on with it.
…
So we can get overwhelmed and say that the human race is terrible, we’re doing terrible things. But actually, if you look very closely at the people around you, you find that most people are doing the right thing. They’re holding doors for each other, they’re helping each other across the street. They’re smiling at little kids ’cause little kids are fun. They’re joking with each other. I would say watch like the UPS man. Watch what’s happening on the street. People are joking with each other. People are lovely. Right?

Unfortunately for us, that loveliness is not reflected in our institutions… But never forget that people are lovely, right? And then for me that takes the overwhelmingness away.

Every day I am grateful for the little things that remind me of life’s potential.

Fake Plastic Fish

Fake Plastic Fish is the blog I am currently devouring (having finished ED Bites, which is very inspirational even if the author’s writing style rubs me the wrong way sometimes), and I just felt like I had to say something about the blog’s author, Beth. She is definitely a bit odd, but only in the most endearing way. Really, all I can think as I read more and more about her efforts to cut down on the new plastic she uses is what an amazing person she is. Sweet, caring, good-humoured and utterly non-pretentious, this woman is someone we should all strive to be more like, not just in her environmental efforts, but in her beautiful love for the world which emanates from every post.

Moo

…cows can also become excited by solving intellectual challenges.

In one study, researchers challenged the animals with a task where they had to find how to open a door to get some food. An electroencephalograph was used to measure their brainwaves.

“Their brainwaves showed their excitement; their heartbeat went up and some even jumped into the air.”

from The secret life of moody cows

More and more, I’m finding myself unable to comprehend how people can be so happy to ignore the truth just to continue to eat animals. A few weeks ago, I was having burgers with friends (Perth people, the place next to Mojo’s has a choice of vegetarian burgers, though the one I had was really mushy and fell apart D:) and a waitress bringing out a burger tripped over a dog and it made a sound of pain. One person, even as they were eating their beef&bacon burger, was asking if the dog was okay. It blew my mind. I asked, did it seem odd to anyone else that we were making so much noise over a dog with a sore paw while they were eating meat? Only to me, apparently. I asked why, trying to figure it out. The answer given was because the pig and the cow weren’t in pain – the dog was.

I dropped it then. No-one likes a long righteous spiel during dinner.

Keep it in mind…

mind-noun
1. (in a human or other conscious being) the element, part, substance, or process that reasons, thinks, feels, wills, perceives, judges, etc.

Which is all fine and good unless you throw in the delicately woven strands of biology&environment which produce a mental illness. At which point, everything you reason (which no-one else will accept as reason, by the by), think, feel, will, percieve and judge is marred by those errant neuron firings and chemical imbalances. Everyone knows not to trust their eyes, but what do you do when you can’t trust your mind? It is a painful and difficult way to live.

I wondered, then about the phrase “out of your mind”. It traditionally is taken to mean that the person is out of their right mind, that is, they are crazy/mad/insane/etc. So while it could be said about people with mental illness that they are “out of their minds”, if you look at the phrase literally, the problem is not so much that they are removed from their minds, but that they remain within a mind that does not meet the socially or personally acceptable level of healthy/normal.

So maybe being out of your mind isn’t such a bad thing when the mind you’re in is inherently distorted.

Back under your bridge

Dear troll,
While I thank you for your opinion, which has led to a reconsideration of my own (and the resulting deletion of a post or two), I must ask you to desist and find something worthwhile to do with your time.

Such as reading. I’ve been powering through, and in the last couple of weeks finished Glue and Porno by Irvine Welsh (best known for Trainspotting, which Porno is the sequel to), Mansfield Park by Jane Austen and am now working on Freud’s On Sexuality, which is a collection of some of his essays & letters on sexuality (clearly).

I’m actually enjoying Freud, although today I got up to the castration complex, which has soured my opinion somewhat. Poor man, thinking that a penis is something to be missed, instead of an extraneous organ, developed to make up for missing a second X chromosome.

But, as I was explaining (loudly, drunkenly, at 5am) on the weekend, while I may have a general disdain for men, and find a lot of people terribly annoying or enraging, at the base of it all I still love them because everyone person is a miracle & contains so much potential. We are the children of the stars.

I will never get that drunk again

I went to see The Hangover a couple of weeks ago, and left the cinema full of rage. I understand that this is supposed to be a “bloke’s film” and it celebrates men and their crazy, crazy shennanigans (because I personally have never woken up with an appalling hangover and only vague recollections of my adventures the night before), but the fact is that it’s complete crap. I’ve got Google up in another tab right now, trying to comprehend how so many people could like it (oh yeah, possibly the fact that the majority of reviewers are male?).

According to the man responsible for this steaming pile, “there’s a real sweetness” to the movie. Maybe, if you’re a misogynistic, immature pleb who willingly accepts the values of society at large instead of developing their own. Personally, I couldn’t get past the fact that the entire movie’s premise is based on one of the four main characters drugging the group with GHB (the date rape drug). Sure, he thought it was ecstasy, and was clearly perfectly within his right to drug his friends without their knowledge or consent. If guys are doing this shit to each other, it’s no wonder they’re doing it to women. Only, haha, most women don’t have a hilarious adventure when they get slipped GHB, they get raped.

Additionally, there were exactly four female characters (excluding, of course, the numerous tit-flashing strippers and whores which we know are representative of women as a whole and don’t need lines or even clothes because, hey, a woman’s value is in her appearance alone). They were as follows:
x Heather Graham, who is a single mother whore/stripper who marries one of the main characters in a spur-of-the-moment Vegas wedding.
x The bride-to-be, who is portrayed as vain, controlling and generally a typical Bridezilla.
x The girlfriend of the man who marries Heather Graham, who is abusive, cruel and generally a bitch (it’s alright though, after her boyfriend cheats on her and marries another woman, he comes to his senses and breaks up with her in a spectacularly crushing manner… at the wedding)
x The fat black lady cop.

The best way to describe this movie is sexist and racist with a handful of well-written lines. The fact that it is being lauded as brilliant further proves my pre-existing theory that most people are idiots.

Oh, and, if you’re worried that this amazing movie will fade from peoples’ minds too soon, you have the sequel to look forward to.