Our Mom is totally losing her cred here....
This week, I fail at being a conscientious reusing/reducing/recycling citizen. You can take away my GREEN card. I am sorry, Mother Earth. Give me my time out. Make me stand in a corner. I’ve been a bad girl.
My ambitious plan to live a more simple life is becoming more and more complicated as I flail about, try to figure out how to best reuse things, pass along our used items, and produce less waste to be transported to a landfill. In my defense, it’s also summer, and I have almost NO time to spare for the implementation lately, and not enough attention for following through with most of my big objectives.
Still. It sucks to feel like you’re failing at something you were so motivated about initially.
My big idea for back-to-school shopping involved figuring out which of my friends have older/bigger children than mine, and begging for their cast offs. This is not working, as it’s rather hard to procure twirlable dresses for the 6 year old and t-shirts with robots and/or puppies on them for the 8 year old. Buying from a consignment store is better than going to Target, right? Except that the prices are either the same OR HIGHER at the consignment store! Yeah, right, and then I’ll replace our toilet paper with twenty-dollar bills! I really can’t do something that is so financially wasteful. So it looks like I’ll be hitting the sales racks at *insert department store name here* and trying not to beat myself up too much about it.
I have even failed lately at putting the organic waste into the compost bucket in the yard. Mostly because, ahem, COMPOSTING IS UTTERLY DISGUSTING *wretch, hurl, ewwwww, icccckk*. We use a small plastic bin to temporarily store the compostables until we can bring them outside, but it stinks when I open the cover, and it keeps getting dropped onto the floor, to the jollies of the ever-present fruit flies, who hover in my kitchen’s corners like crack-addict buzzards. No one wants to continue the composting experiment we started at the beginning of spring with such high hopes. My kids, who LOVE science and bugs and getting dirty, have gone on strike over the disgusting chore of emptying the compost.
And lastly, I have items that are seriously worn to nubs, and I don’t know what to do with them. Like the bathrobe Allen got me in 1998. Or the 15-year-old stompy platform shoes that are too worn out to pass along. I’m sure there are clever uses for these much-loved but worn-out things, right? Martha Stewart could probably transform that robe into a sassy winter wrap or a spiffy looking blanket. She could make delicious meat-free burgers from the worn shoe leather of my stompy shoes. I, on the other hand, threw them in a trash bag and “stored” the bag in my basement.
And speaking of basements — mine is where clutter lives in perpetuity. What I want to do is rent a dumpster and be less sentimental. But that would also mean sending stuff off to the landfill instead of being conscientious and thoughtful about my refuse. I should put things on Craigs List and Freecycle, have a yard sale, advertise my cast offs on the town’s list serv.
Should. It’s a word I use too often these days. I should do something about that.
What do YOU do when you have too many “shoulds” but even more “don’t wannas” and a serious lack of time/motivation/energy to get stuff done? Should I just get the ADD diagnosis now, eat more bran, drink more coffee, have a beer, get a life?