A hippie by necessity

I’ve never considered myself a hippie, although I do consider myself “different” then a lot of women.  (Maybe “tomboy” is the correct term considering my love of shooting guns and playing video games.)  I like who I am and don’t see a real need to change, except for any unattractive habits that may come up.  I don’t have a problem with hippies or conservatives or anyone else, as long as they aren’t in the extreme on either side of the spectrum.  But I’ve never considered myself a hippie until lately.

I have been changing our diets slowly but surely to a more organic diet.  We cut down on alcohol and caffeine, we are drinking organic milk and when I can afford to buy more organic food, I do.  I also bought a cast iron skillet finally because it will last longer and doesn’t have Teflon or other non-stick chemicals all over it.  As we run out of household cleaners, I’m replacing them with “green” cleaners.  By the way, all this shit is rather pricey.

Due to the popularity of Facebook, I find myself talking to people from home/high school a lot more then I did when I actually went to school with them.  I can’t believe how many people have some kind of autoimmune disease.  These are people my age - early 30’s.  I’m getting pretty frickin’ paranoid that even though some of the shit I have is inherited, that all the chemicals we grow up eating and breathing can’t be helping.  In fact, I wonder if over the generations all the chemicals in our environment aren’t causing some of this.  Anyone heard of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson?  I did a paper on it in grad school when I was studying integrated pest management.  She realized one spring that the birds weren’t singing as much as they normally did each spring.  Basically through her research she discovered that DDT, a popular pesticide, had made it’s way into our ground water and thus into our food chain.  Certain species of birds were dying because their egg shells were so thin that none of the babies were making past the incubation phase.   Her book and all the controversy that it made led to state legislation all over the nation to ban dangerous pesticides.  And how did she die? Breast cancer; the incidence of which has gone up considerably since WWII when more chemicals began to be regularly dumped into the environment.   Reminds me of Marie Curie and radium in some ways.

No one can eliminate his/her exposure to chemicals completely.  But I have to cringe whenever I see commercials for scented candles and oils and sprays that companies want you to spray around your house.  If your house stinks all the time, clean it.  Quit covering up the stank with chemicals for cripe’s sakes.

On that note then, my resolutions to eat better are going well.  We hardly drink anymore (boo!!!!  beer tastes good dammit), I’ve had fried food once and am eating better overall.  Do I feel better?  Not yet.  I have a feeling that eventually I will.

I leave you with some KC fog shots.  It’s been kinda creepy/romantic outside.  I think I’m ready for April but love that we’ve had snow and fog to change things up around here a bit.

Tschus.

This entry was posted on 18. January 2010 at 14:00 and is filed under Blogs, Books, Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.