An iPhone Analogy to Hester Prynne's Self-imposed Isolation. Maybe.

I woke up alone this morning. 
Unable to roll left for fear of a growling small cat, or roll right for fear of a playful fully-clawed big cat.  The cats are not company, they are Bed Wedges, so they can herd me to their food dishes as soon as possible after dawn.

 So, I was alone.

No smart phone within reach.
No smart phone in the house.
No Smart Phone.

No instant time check available. No check for messages, texts, calls.  No check for weather (I was forced to open the door in my pajamas and step outside).  No Pandora to cosy up to and grease the path to consciousness.

Alone, alone, alone.

My phone was simply nowhere to be found last night.  Probably dead.  Not in bag, pocket, car.  Possibly left at a Convention Center where 5,000+ Democrats had convened for nearly 12 hours yesterday.  I had no way to call and find out.  And dreaded the answer. Something to ponder as the gray day flooded the bed full of cat.

Feeling my mental way blindly through the first waking minutes, I fed cats, exposed my pajamas to the neighbors, forewent the radio news (way too early to endure The Trump Show).  I considered FB messaging a few people to let them know I was alive, then re-considered.  That was their job.  If I was dead, it would not be my problem.  In the event that my heart gives out or a murderer makes it past the cats and a baseball bat, I certainly would not be hitting 911 for a quick fix--which is one of my ongoing Ms. Manners dilemmas anyway ("When to call for Emergency Responders?").  Nope, today if everything mine goes south, I'll be content to decompose a few days.  Technology will not be complicit to a clean, mess-less exit on my behalf.  My feeling is that Death Is Better Off Without Technology. 

Slowly coming to terms with this smartphone absence in the ether, I experienced a kind of buoyancy.  Specifically: my little ship of state was, suddenly, not tied up at any dock.  Cast my brain to the wind, like. All the things I planned to worry about today are still on the agenda, but felt somehow different.  No one could call to see what I was up to, which eliminated obligatory Defense of Intended Actions.  Which gets to be a burden, because its hard enough to Just Go Do Something without explaining or justifying it.  With the effortless contact of an iPhone, anyone can demand anything with minimal effort.  But  sans-phone, no texts to remind me that at the Health Food Store if I spent $50 I could get 10% off of supplements I will never ever purchase.  No reminders that there were a couple of birthdays, events, appointments that I as a proud functioning member of Elite Smartphone Users must be aware of.   Being not-hooked-into my phone partially delivers me from being held socially accountable.

It's disorienting, as we all know.

But as wonder in the Brave (Old) (Pre-Smartphone) World swelled in me, I heard the empty sound of my broken doorbell not-working.  I opened the door to my phone, in the apologetic hands of a passenger in my car to the convention.  She was the agent of its disappearance, and before the noon hour she realized it wasn't her phone, and I was restored to the alternate iPhone universe.

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, indeed. 

How far down the "Luddite" path is realistic?  Back to exclusive land-line phone use?
Little breaks in reality become more frequent with age.  Waking up alone aka without-instant validation/reality-as-data is different, not bad.  Self-validation is one of those things I feel better with in my pocket, but if it has a cracked case, better off finding alternate sources, Mom would say.  Never.

1.  Ernest Hemingway, misogynist royale, "The Short Happy Life of Frances Macomber" 1936?  A coward goes hunting in Africa with manly EH guide.  Francis' beautiful ball-cutting wife (in EH stories it's a beautiful-women job) was implicit in Francis' offing of himself after he attained courage on the shoot.  He enjoyed his courage for a very short time.  Like, hours.
2.  I know that a list of adjectives is a prescribed place to insert commas.  I just like to not use them.  (You know who you are)
3.  I love hyphenated words.  I love German words that take up whole sentences, and aspire to move English in that direction with the gentle nudge of hyphens.  Thank you for participating in this project.

Small things can spark a war.

After a cursory Saturday visit to the gym, my friend and I get down to breakfast at the nearby diner. This is a nice ritual of friendship, practiced over years.  We know the waitstaff, they know us.  This last visit, however, instead of my usual quiet reserved self, I Jekyl-Hyde-d the waiter.  I spoke out, I engaged, stepped outside the friendly social parameters of waiter/ waitee.  I revealed my parentage: Mom.  She was probably Yahweh in another life, but regardless, she retained the Right to Be Righteous in her last one.  Mom always knew what was right, and never ever hesitated to reveal that information.  She was a bonafide Moral Compass. 

So, this biblical DNA came home to roost as we sat in the nice diner having mediocre good crappy breakfast grease.  I saw plastic, and I simultaneously Saw Red.   I can't believe the things that come out of my mouth when it comes to plastic (and politics).  But having in my head the prediction that, by 2050,  half of everything in the ocean would be plastic, some synapses started snapping somewhere inside.  All the warning survival instincts in my bloodlines started shouting alarms.  My heart hurts for the planet, for the people, for the resources.  My blood rushed at that moment, and I became a spokesperson.  I started in on The Plastic at our table.  My friend leaned back in her seat to be further from me, I thought, but she did not tell me to clam up, and I think she's really in agreement. 

Most people are becoming very aware of the rape and pillage of the environment--mostly by technology, mostly by the U.S. and China, and mostly by human-induced climate change.  Plastic has its own horror stories.  Walk into ANY store in the U.S., and not only do you see plastic items for sale everywhere you look, but everything is encased in plastic.  Everything is disposable. There are mountains of it, buried in the oceans and under the earth.  AND NONE OF IT HAS GONE AWAY SINCE IT WAS DUMPED THERE. 

All the debris currently clogging the waters of the planet threatens the life of the increasingly-stressed ocean life, from corals to whales.  And increasingly, as fish become harmed, overharvested, and reproduce less, this means less food in the chain for us top-feeders.  As well as heartbreaking loss of fellow live creatures to keep the balance of life on the planet.  Creative minds have found ways to use plastic, recycle it, re-use or reconstruct it.  But the re-use's still get tossed someday. 

Hope, however, always exists, in some really unexpected places: Some young man in Denmark has invented a sweep that might be the answer to clean up the ocean (1).   And some researchers have found that an existing type of mealworm actually breaks down plastic so it isn't even plastic anymore!(2)  Not even tiny little life-threatening microbeads remain as plastic once these mealworms eat it. AND, and the mealworms are still able to reproduce on this diet. You have to wonder if evolution provided this escape hatch for the planet, eons ago, in a kind of time loop.  I truly hope so, because that means there might be more in the arsenal than we know of at this point. 

So when the waiter in the diner handed me a straw, I said, "I don't believe in using straws, because they are a huge contributor to landfill and environmental pollution."  He looked at me a second, processing the shift in his routine, and shrugged.

"Okay, " he said, and stuck it back in his pocket.

I said, " You could just eliminate straws altogether and let people drink out of glasses."  I demonstrated doing just that.  He shrugged again and shifted his feet.  He was filling in for a waitress and wanted to get back to important stuff as soon as possible. 

I pointed at the little bowl of plastic-packaged creamers and jelly, and said, " Those are plastic. You could use little metal or china creamers, and jelly pots."

He sighed and said, " Yeah, I don't make the decisions, you'd have to talk to my Dad."
I said, "You're right.  I will write up a letter and bring it next time.  But you get an opinion, too."
He smiled and said his favorite word, "Yeah."  He took our order to the cook. 

No one was saved, but I realized I could do much better than harass the waitstaff.  Why can't socially conscious restaurants--and there are many--share plastic-free business savvy? Myself,  I'm going to make up little cards encouraging restaurants I eat at, and patrons in the restaurant, to go for LOW PLASTIC.  There are a lot of ways to do this, and some are very simple.  One of my favorite restaurants uses cardboard take-out boxes instead of evil Styrofoam (if you don't bring your own container, which is a doable option.  Or just order less food, because the global food shortage is going to kick in one of these days.) Most people would really LIKE to change their plastic habits, but it is so engrained that we don't know how.  We will need to start a grassroots movement, a ripple effect, of information.  We can start by Just Saying NO to Plastic.  Grassroots works. All we have to do is START.

And there's the DNA thing.  Survival instinct. Dad was a Marine in WW2.  Trauma to the parent resurfaces in the child. Fighting for the planet is an evolutionary battle, it requires sacrifice and changes that we won't want to make. Mom's morals, Dad's actions.  All our ancestors fought, and handed us the evolutionary skills to survive. We have racial memory.  We have sophisticated and technological survival resources.  We are recognizing the issues.

We can fight to reduce the use and acceptability of all forms of plastic.  Hit on the waitstaff at diners.  Set an example by doing.  Practice plastic-free living (3).  Fight in the diners, fight in the streets, fight on the internet (4) .

We Can Do It.

1. Mealworms may help reduce plastic waste: 
http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/30/us/styrofoam-eating-mealworms-plastic-waste/index.html
2. Teen Invents Ocean Clean-Up: 
http://www.hngn.com/articles/11969/20130909/teen-invents-ocean-clean-up-device-remove-1-3-plastic.htm
3. My Plastic Free Life --a terrific wonderful blog!!  And there are other resources on living plastic-free.    http://myplasticfreelife.com/
4.  Paraphrasing the probably most famous  and inspirational fight speech EVER,  Winston Churchill's call to Britain in WW2: 
 http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/97957-we-shall-go-on-to-the-end-we-shall-fight

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-CHANges

I just read an article suggesting that: to embrace cold weather is to love cold weather.  That's what people reportedly do in the upper reaches of Norway--Tromso to be specific--where the sun barely glimmers from November through February. In chilly, sun-filtered Michigan, interesting to think of a frozen town in far-off, exotic Tromso, Norway.  There, in a twilight kind of sky, heavily-bundled persons ski out windows, drink hot cocoa, and do snuggly things under furs.  All very communal and friendly (1).

Novembers have always been dear to my heart.  Today, that's eating beef kidney stew, surfing the Net, and swilling hot, black tea. But November has taken on added meaning for me, the last couple years.  Now, it's also a harbinger of Winter as a Suck-The-Life-From-Old-People change. Getting older changes things.  Things like my body, specifically. Those changes don't ease in, either.  Last November, I watched my face and skin dry out in a matter of a few days when temperatures plunged and humidity disappeared.  And there are the aches and twinges, building up.  It has dawned on me that those aches and twinges are not going away.   Ergo arthritis is a permanent part of my life.  And here it is, November again.  That means more wrinkles and stiff joints.  Which builds character.

I read about the Happy Norwegians and wonder about their arthritis status in the cold months.  The study about Tromso did not go there.  So I Google "international arthritis rates " and find this interesting chart, which I can't figure out.  But it clearly shows that all countries will give you arthritis (2)

Apparently, arthritis thrives everywhere on the planet, whether or not the weather is cold.  Moving to Australia might or might not make a difference, according to the chart which I can't read.  Possibly people in Australia are physically active enough to keep arthritis at bay, but not enough to damage joints. It's hard to tell.  If you figure it out, let me know.

I do herbs, stretch, walk around town, do some gym. Every effort helps.  Movement is life, they say, and I believe it. But those things won't stop changes, just ease them.  Maybe without changes, we'd all lose interest.

I visualize ageing people in Tromso, scooting out snow-bound windows on sled or skis.  With hot grogg in one hand.  I'll adopt Tromso's plan and slide into changes.  Easier on the joints.

1. http://www.fastcompany.com/3052970/how-to-be-a-success-at-everything/the-norwegian-secret-to-enjoying-a-long-winter
2. http://www.rightdiagnosis.com/a/arthritis/stats-country.htm