Green Gal

 "Where does it start? Muscles tense. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between the earth and sky. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind. Heel touches down. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of the foot. The big toe pushes off, and the delicately balanced weight of the body shifts again. The legs reverse position. It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking. The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world, this walking that wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak." - Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking For most of January, I didn't ride my bicycle. First it had a flat tire, then it was raining cats and dogs for a few weeks, and this week, I accidentally left my bike helmet with a friend. Fortunately, Green Guy's commute aligns fairly well with mine, so I...

I was pleasantly surprised to come home this evening to find a new comment on my blog, alerting me that I had been nominated for the Sunshine Award by Canopy Avenue ! I was delighted and honored, as well as excited because when receiving this award, you are given the task to nominate 10 more blogs for the award! Here are the award tasks: 1. If you are nominated, you must blog a post linking back to the person/blog that nominated you. 2. You must answer some questions, nominate ten fellow bloggers and link their blogs to the post! 3. You should comment on your nominees’ blogs to let them know you’ve nominated them. Here are the questions: 1. Who is your favorite philosopher? Today, Martin Heidegger because I'm reading him in a class in college right now, and because he wrote this: "The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his essence. The ...

Starting this blog 3 years ago was probably one of the best decisions I ever made. I didn't quite realize how important the blog would be to my life or that it would become a valuable place for me to explore my writing style, learn innumerable new sustainable lifestyle tips, and truly hone in on what I’m passionate about. Green Gal on her way to high school a few years ago. Around the same time that I started the Green Gal blog, I also started a literature blog called perennial Thoughts . My whole life I figured I’d study literature, and I was right. But I also figured I’d go on to become an English teacher or a writer of fiction. In eighth grade health class we had to create a timeline for our lives, and on mine I put that by age 25 I would have published my first book. I figured it would be creative writing, or something fictional. I participated in NanoWriMo a few years in high school and joined the school’s writing club. I wrote for our local Patch back whe...

"Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By 'they' I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual  is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness. The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer. I came up here from the monastery last night, sloshing through the cornfield, said Vespers, and p...

Need another reason to recycle? Sometimes it's easier to just toss a recyclable into a nearby trashcan than to wait until you find a recycling bin, but here's a good reason to wait and dispose of it properly: "Paper takes up 40-50 percent of the volume in American landfills. Despite the growing commitment to local recycling programs, the amount of paper is steadily rising--up from 35 percent in 1970. The rest of a landfill consists of in descending order of volume, construction/demolition debris, metals, plastics, other materials, food and yard waste, and glass." That quote is from my Archaeology textbook, Archaeology: Down to Earth by Robert L. Kelly and David Hurst Thomas (4th edition, published 2011 by Wadsworth CENGAGE Learning). A lot of the stuff listed there is recyclable and shouldn't even be in the landfill. We could save a whole lot of space for actual garbage by recycling things that are recyclable--especially paper! On another note, in core class toda...

It's Friday! I wish I could express fully how stoked off life I am right now...and maybe that's the double shot caramel soy latte I had before class that's talking, but my neighbors are playing some cool music that is making me all the more enthused. I wanna get up and dance. Here's a quick bit about my day, and then I'm off to eat delicious organic salad with a really wonderful person. I just had a fantastic Core class discussion out on the Stevenson knoll in the sun about Gandhi, his letter to Hitler, and Nietzsche. After the discussion, my instructor Mr. Schafer asked us all to take a moment to be grateful for the beautiful view and the fact that we go to UCSC. Shouts of joy rose into the sky from our circle. After class, myself and three other students wandered around Cowell and Stevenson colleges with Mr. Schafer, talking about inspiring books and learning a little bit about one another. I talked about the wonders of Thoreau's Walden and mentioned how Thor...

Lately, my favorite thing to watch on TV has been Ken Burn's National Parks: America's Best Idea series. Sometimes I'm lucky enough to catch it when it's actually on TV, but many days I end up watching it On Demand. Last night, the only episode On Demand was one I've already seen, so I scanned through the other History & Nature shows on the Comcast On Demand menu and saw that there was something from PBS Nova called "Megabeasts' Sudden Death." I opened it to read the description and was so incredibly excited! It was an episode about the new theory of what killed off the megafauna (like mammoth, mastodon, giant sloth) at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, right around the time of the last ice age. If you recall, I wrote an entire research paper on this subject for my English class earlier this year, so I was very eager to watch the show. Short-faced bear and other animals, with mastodons in the background. It focused on the new evidence that a com...

Today I spoke with a woman from the admissions department at Prescott College in Arizona. She informed me that I've been accepted to the school, and that I'm being given some scholarships! I would love to go to Prescott, but it is the first place I've heard from so for now I can't say whether or not I'll end up actually going there. It is an expensive school and it's far away, but I am so glad to know I got in! I'd like to share with you the essay I applied with: Before I could even speak, my dad read to me—poems, stories, T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare. After much practice, I had the “To be or not to be” soliloquy mostly memorized by age seven. In the community college English class my dad teaches, he shows a tape of seven-year-old me donning a black turtleneck, sitting in a rocking chair, and reciting Hamlet’s famous lines about contemplating “that sleep of death.” My dad says it’s his favorite film version of the scene. Years later, my dream job was to be an E...

First off, a quick update: my hair is still not super oily. I can feel the oil when I touch the top of my head, but no one can tell. The make-it-yourself deodorant works, as long as you don't go on a bike ride at top speed and sweat it off (however, I may not have applied enough that day because I used a blush brush...still have not found a suitable applicator. I tried a powder puff and that put too much. Cotton balls come apart and they aren't reusable.) Veganism is still going strong...but you'll see in a few moments why I've been challenged by my options and why it hasn't been at the forefront of my mind every time I eat something (although it's not like I've eaten meat or cheese...just things that may contain small amounts of dairy). Since Saturday, my family and I have been in and out of the hospital with my sister. She had a kidney transplant on Monday and is doing great! We plan on being here for a few weeks, staying nearby at a Ronald McDonald Hou...

It's been almost a week since I first washed my hair with just water--no shampoo. And it's looking great! Before I went no shampoo , I used LUSH shampoo, and I never style it with fancy chemical product, so it's been pretty natural for awhile now. I usually only wash it two or three times a week, so the transition shouldn't be too difficult. So far I've washed it twice with just water and it's as thick and lovely as before. My hair doesn't get oily very easily, so fortunately, it's only a little bit oily near the top of my head, but not noticeably so. Now I'm saving materials (and money!) and reducing the amount of chemicals that go down the drain--all while becoming more natural and less reliant on chemicals and industry. I'm trying to convince my mom to try it, but she's used to shampoo and using styling products and making her hair look nice, so it would take a lot to convince her. I tested out Melinda's deodorant recipe of baking so...