Breakfast: Kashi cereal with soy milk.
Lunch: Two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (I have got to stop eating those!), 1 plum, 1 peach, Some organic raspberry organic yogurt.
Dinner: Sautéed string beans with brown rice (and too much soy sauce).
Cravings: Take-out Chinese!
Mood: Impossible to tell--I’ve had a sinus headache for about 30 hours.
Some of my co-workers are driving me absolutely batty! They will not lay off all that “Are you following all the rules?” stuff. And I swear, if one more person asks me if I can eat a peach or a nacho chip or drink WATER, then I am going to need a defense attorney. My boss is real sweet though; she brings me local and organic fruit just about every day. And she’s totally cool about the turning off the monitor thing--turns out she doesn’t really care if I step away from my desk as long as the work gets done. Of course, I wonder whether the fruit thing will come up in my evaluation and if so, how? Maybe she’ll say; “Can we give Raina a big fat raise so she can buy her own local and organic peaches?” But the ever-present paranoid part of me thinks it’ll come down to something like this: “I supported Raina with local and organic fruit during her Freegan experiment. Now I feel like she still expects it and it’s making me uncomfortable. I say just go ahead and fire her!” See, so now I’ve put my fears in the blog and she’ll have to find another reason to fire me if she’s so inclined!
I’m going to apologize in advance for today’s entry. It’s sure to come across as scattered and pointless because I HAVE HAD A SINUS HEADACHE FOR 30 STRAIGHT HOURS. I don’t know what I’m allergic to; but it is kicking my butt! So, gentle readers, if you have any experience with sinus headaches and know of any home remedies, I would be most appreciative because at this point, there’s a good chance tomorrow’s blog will be about 1000 words of this; “uyhjnnnnnnnnnn;” which is what you get when you rest your forehead on the keyboard.
So you may or may not have noticed but one of the salient parts of the Freegan manifesto is; “Freegans embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing.” So I’ve been trying to be really, really nice to people. That’s not such a big deal for me, I’m a pretty nice person to begin with; but I’ve been trying to be nice to strangers and the results have been, well, mixed. I’ve been trying to smile at people who catch my eye in the subway or on the street and let me just tell you, there is a reason people tell you not to do that. From my recent experiences, I even think it’s fair to say that the average person passionately hates to be smiled at. (And I don’t think this is limited to NYC either; but what the heck do I know, this experiment doesn’t really facilitate travel.) Some people look back at you with an expression fixed somewhere between being possessed by Satan and fear that you are Satan. Others turn away as if to discourage me from speaking to them (which I wasn’t going to do! I have my own life and I have plenty of better things to do other then talk to you!) And some people actually jump out of their skin as if I’d threatened them with violence. I smiled at a uniformed member of the New York Police Department and he not only grimaced at me; he straightened up and put his hand on the butt of his gun. The only conclusion I can draw from that is that I’m a menace to society - a mad smiler who must be stopped. And then there was the ‘incident’ from this morning (on the corner of 58th Street and Eighth Avenue), I stopped at the corner and was waiting to cross the street when a man smiled at me and said what my iPod stuffed ears thought was hello. So, I did the polite thing (removed both ear buds) and said “hi” back. Check out his response; “What? Why are you watching me? It’s not fair; I don’t watch you so don’t watch me. I am constantly being watched and I can’t take it anymore. Everywhere I go, I’m watched.” At this point, what was left of my smile looked like I’d just eaten an onion-flavored jelly-bean. I’m going to have come back to the generosity and sharing thing later in the month though I do wonder if because of my headache, my smile doesn’t look like a smile. Perhaps it looks like a completely insane rictus of pain and really I’m frightening people.
One more thing, I’ve begun recycling even the smallest bits of paper like envelopes and scrap paper and stuff like that and I thought it was going to be a real headache (sorry, couldn’t resist) but it’s not that big a deal (Freegans: 1 Lazy: 0). Oh and I’ve begun to take some advice from Janet Luhrs and her book The Simple Living Guide. Truthfully, I skipped right over the meditation part (I’ve tried! I can’t meditate. My brain resorts to making animal noises if you force it to be still.) and have fixated on the bit of the book where she says: “Spirituality is also about bringing mindfulness to everyday activities.” See, this is the part that gets environmentalists mad at us (remember “us” is the average American--we’re all in this together.) We have gotten used to having a lot of stuff all the time and it’s been long time since we’ve had to really think about where it’s coming from. But now that time has come, right? (Right!)
Good News: We had a little party at work and there were free vegetables and other vegan tasties to eat. I was so happy. I probably embarrassed myself.
Bad News: Chickened out on the Park Slope Food Co-op. The headache wouldn’t allow it. Barring a miracle, I should have just enough soy milk to last until the next orientation on Friday.
Worries: Still no concrete plan for BFF birthday gift.
