Breakfast: Skipped it!

Lunch: No time to make it!

Dinner: A plate of pasta primavera so big that I should not have been able to eat it in 8 minutes (but I did!)

Cravings: Absolutely any kind of food that hasn’t been cooked by me.

Mood: OK, just feeling a bit cranky, not about capitalists, weirdly. It’s the environmentalists that are getting on my nerves.

So I chose to go without lunch because I had to choose between being really late for work and being a little bit late for work. I know, I know, I could have made said lunch the day before or gotten up earlier and made it, but I didn’t. I chose to get some sleep and then wake up and dawdle in the shower. Now on the scale of human suffering, I know that a missed lunch doesn’t register at all (not even a blip!) but I mention it because I want to first publicly apologize to my husband for that totally undeserved attack on his character last night. (I was so hungry and three handfuls of trail mix does not regulate one’s blood sugar as well as I hoped.) And secondly, because the whole lunch debacle helped me figure something out. I think I did it on purpose so someone, anyone would feel sorry for me and tell me I could order in Chinese food for lunch. My subconscious is rebelling because it thinks this experiment is ill conceived and could quite possibly kill me. It’s (still, for better or worse, talking about my subconscious here) trying to come up with iron-clad excuses to break the rules. Overslept for national television? Oops, take the SUV into town. Forget your lunch? Eat out! Buy Big! Shoot just last night, my subconscious was trying to con me into buying a Nintendo Wii and my first pair of Blahniks. Which in and of itself, is an incredibly long way of telling you that I feel your pain because it’s my pain too. What all the commentators and experts and documentaries don’t understand is that we (and by we, I mean your average American) just found out about Global Warming. OK, I know the science has been out there for years but as far as WE are concerned, we just found out that our daily experience is destroying the planet. And before THEY show us another picture of a dying polar bear, could we just take a minute to absorb the fact that we could be underwater in 50 years? All, I think, we’re asking for is a small window of time to internalize the facts. And then we need another window of time to figure out if we really believe you. Because it looks to me like we’ve been threatened with extinction before. (Wasn’t Avian flu supposed to kill us all? And what the flock happened to SARS or are they the same thing?) I mean really, the local news has been predicting our death due to E. coli and common household accidents for so long, it doesn’t even register. Not to mention that we’re in midst of two wars, a sub-prime meltdown, the stress of our daily lives, rolling political scandals and a bridge collapsing for no reason except maybe pigeon excrement. I’m not being flip and I’m not saying that we don’t need to change our ways; but could you lay off the fear tactics, we’ve got a lot on our plates. I say, try sweet talk and a little humor, but what do I know?

And another thing, I Googled myself. (Oh stop it, you do it too.) And I was shocked to see how negatively I have been perceived in the blogosphere (that is, when I’ve even been noticed.). Most of it was the usual cracks: fat, lonely, overambitious, stupid, wordy, lacking in originality, etc.; but what really got to me was how quick people are to dismiss my experiment outright as hypocritical and disingenuous. I know that while I'm making some fairly radical changes to my life (No? Ok you try it!) - I’m not living as a completely authentic Freegan. It's temporary. But I’m also not trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. And besides, nobody is a completely authentic anything - Vegans ride in cars made, in part, using animal by-products or watch TV sponsored by Perdue. Freegans have bank accounts. Leonardo DiCaprio rides on airplanes. Al Gore eats meat and the list goes on and on and on. So, I’m just saying, if we hyper-consumerist, gas-guzzling, Arctic cap melting Americans are cursed to be damned if we do or damned if we don’t, we won’t. Oh sure, we’ll recycle and we might even stop asking for plastic bags; but we won’t demand sustainable energy sources and we won’t engage our lawmakers to create legislation that makes good environmental sense and doesn’t also punish us for doing the right thing. And we’ll buy compact florescent bulbs, but between the insults and the guilt and the fear, we might be too paralyzed to put them in our lamps. And stop telling us we’re dawdling in the shower! Oh, and if we all agree to turn off the water while we’re brushing our teeth, will you stop with the nagging? I apologize for shooting the messengers but if you want to know what we’re thinking, that’s it. (We’re also thinking that this carbon offset thing seems like a crock and could someone explain it a bit better and then tell us why we have to do it and not, say, a petroleum company or some airline somewhere.) Which brings me back to the point of this whole thing: This experiment may be forcing me to give up "everything"; but it is also giving me the opportunity to spend a month examining the impact of my previous way of life or a Hillary Clinton would say; "Start a conversation." Because let’s face it, sides are being taken, positions are hardening and the whole environmental thing is getting a little hostile

One more thing, since I’m on a tear …just because we like one or two or even three television shows with similar plotlines that does not mean we want to watch 12 more poorly-conceived versions of the same thing.

Good News: Joining the Park Slope Food Co-op tonight!!!! Soy milk here I come!

Bad News: I don’t think the BFF is buying that gift of time thing for her birthday this weekend. (Any ideas? And by the way, you really saved me with the okra thing--fried it is!)

Worries: Maybe I was a bit harsh today.