Here’s a comprehensive answer to a question I asked many a post ago: what happens if you routinely screw up your recycling?
When loads of plastic are dumped on a recycling facility’s floor, the sorting fun begins. Workers often start by picking through the piles in search of obviously discordant items-kiddie play sets, lawn furniture, clothing mannequins. They also scan for plastic mounds that are drenched in nonrecyclable trash, such as food slurries or medical waste.
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Those of us who want to avoid the social nightmare have to hide our vegetarianism like an Oxycontin addiction, because admit it, omnivores: You know nothing about us. Do we eat fish? Will we panic if confronted with a hamburger? Are we dying of malnutrition? You have no clue.
In all seriousness, I think vegetarianism is admirable (although PETA, which runs ads that objectify women in order to promote its agenda of giving humanity to animals, can suck it). But I’ve never understood my vegetarian friends’ complaints of the difficulty of finding anything to eat. I’m not even remotely a vegetarian, and I’d estimate that 90% of my diet is cheese, bread and sugar.
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I am nothing if not a lover of routine – in fact, my behavior is so habitual that it borders on insane. Like many writers, I find that I am unable to be creative at all if I don’t build being creative into a fairly rigid routine. According to this article, the important thing is to change up your habits:
. . . it seems antithetical to talk about habits in the same context as creativity and innovation. But brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.
Not long ago, I leafed through a book (can’t remember the title) that was basically a longer version of the above article. The book’s author advised that, to free up creative thinking and combat brain atrophy (and possibly Alzheimer’s), you should constantly be trying to surprise your own brain by doing something jolting – walking a different way to work, writing with the wrong hand, using the opposite hand to do different tasks, performing daily activities in a different order than usual, and so forth. Hmm. Maybe I should build breaking my routine into my routine.
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Lindsay Beyerstein responds to Thomas Friedman on subprime mortgages:
Earlier generations weren’t more virtuous because they had less debt. Their dollars bought more. They were more likely to have steady jobs with benefits, including employer-subsidized incentives to save . . . Americans have always valued hard work–and nothing has changed. In the USA, the average worker clocks more hours than anywhere else in the industrialized world.
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A very brief history of illegal immigration:
Chinese exclusion invented something like the concept and business of modern illegal immigration.
(Related, sometimes a picture is worth a thousand misspelled words.)
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And finally, this is way cooler than missed connections: if you live in New York, this guy might draw you…especially if you hang out much at the Taco Bell on 14th. (via Kottke)
