water use

Feb 25th 2009
From Economist.com

Thirsty work
The water needed to produce everyday goods and beverages

WATER is a precious commodity, as any farmer in drought-besieged parts of China, America or Kenya knows only too well. Consumers may already be aware of the environmental impact of producing goods in terms of energy or pollution, but they might be surprised to learn how much water is needed to create some daily goods. A cup of coffee, for example, needs a great deal more water than that poured into the pot. According to a new book on the subject, 1,120 litres of water go into producing a single litre of the beverage, once growing the beans, packaging and so on are measured. Only 120 litres go into making the same amount of tea. As many as four litres of water are used to make a litre of the bottled stuff. Household items are even thirstier. Thousands of litres are needed to make shoes, hamburgers and microchips.

interior design... whoa!

i recently (like 5 minutes ago) found out that i share common goal with one of my co-workers. to work for an interior design magazine. i would like to edit one, and she would like to do the design for one. pretty interesting convergence.

i like to think that i'm pretty in-tune to what is going on in the industry. i don't have my finger on the pulse of it (as people like to say), but i'd like to. i've always liked to know more than others. i want to be the one to predict a trend, to introduce new people to the world, and to teach others the knowledge that i have collected.

(side note: i think that is one of the reasons i want to go to graduate school. so i can teach. you can't teach in the usa without having a degree in education or a master's in whatever you are teaching.)

i am also good at piecing things together and editing out what doesn't fit. i can do page layout, text editing, and management. i just need something to inspire me. or to push me to reach for the things i want. the problem is that they are all over the map. stretching in multiple directions all the time is quite exhausting. streamline. all good editors know how to do this, and i have to remind myself that it also applies to my life. STREAMLINE!

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
-e e cummings somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

the economy

damn money sucks! if you haven't noticed, the economy has gone to shit over the past year. well i know that it's been going to shit for much longer than that, but no one else felt like popping the bubble that was the becoming bigger and bigger.

i always thought that something was wrong. there's no way that so many people could be making that much money without taking it from someone else. now i don't want to imply that they were stealing it. they presented the information to their clients about what they were doing. and granted they said the investments were risk free. but that was based off of a housing market they thought would never crash. like markets never have their own ups and downs. i blame the entire society. for encouraging this behavior about money and finances.

i know very little about money and it's life in the world. but i know that everything in life has risk. some things have a little less or more than others. it seemed bizarre that companies were so willing to throw their money at investments that have so little information behind them. i read recently that the risk value was calculated by some crazy algorithm. i find that worth some thought. i believe in mathematics and its ability to calculate away a lot of the unknowns in the world, but there's always something unknown. theorems and equations don't become solid quantifiers of the risk without some sort of probability of it being wrong. especially when humans are part of the equation.

i will rant more on this later. when i care a little more.

new york, chicago, los angeles, tri-coastal?

i’m fresh off of a valentine’s weekend in brooklyn with my sweetie. the dear bought my plane ticket out there and a dozen roses for my enjoyment while there. many a thing to contemplate from just the past two days. new york versus chicago versus los angeles. the merit and disadvantage of long-distance relationships. even, food in bars and economics in politics.

i think i’ll stick to the nyc vs chi-town issue. see, i’ve lived in southern california. i’ve lived in new york city. now i live in chicago. what does that make me? i was reading the gristmill blog, http://gristmill.grist.org/, and one of the comments was from someone in a similar position to me. he described himself as tri-coastal, with the definitional of ‘coast’ as being places with sand near a body of water where you can’t see the end of the water on the horizon. thus defining lake michigan as a coastal body of water.

i like to think of myself as trans-urban. able to fit in, in any major city. i can speed through la in my sporty two-door coupe, or trek along the crazy streets of nyc avoiding the even crazier tourists, or chug beer with the best of the sports fans at my local chicago bar. now i will honestly admit that i do not hold chicago as dear to my heart as new york, but it definitely beats out la for the darkest corner. but i want to further my list of cities lived in and loved to include most of the major cities in the world: dublin, paris, moscow, bombay, and many more. i just can’t get enough of the culture, people, and hustle-and-bustle of the urban environment. i end up so enthralled watching and contemplating the world around me i remain unscathed by the rudeness and oversight that occurs in masses of people.

sorry about the long pause...

sorry about the long pause...

but i'll get started again. tonight. unfortunately my boss is looking over my shoulder right now. otherwise i would totally indulge right now.

An Inch Here...

'An Inch Here...' is my outlet for all the thoughts that swirl around my head. It's inspired from the saying "if you give an inch here, you lose an inch there". With all the things buzzing in and out of my life, I'm sick of losing bits of myself. Each new thought that streams through my head erases another. There are some that sit and stew for years and others that are fleeting, gone with a blink of the eye. I want to use this blog to store all the thoughts that would be lost otherwise. Some will be stewed on, encompassing many posts. Others will be little things noticed out of the corner of my eye.

I hope this is entertaining.

vitamins: easy fix or constant problem?

Some things that are supposed to help you have the appearance of the easy fix. Use the stairs instead of the elevator. Eat more fruit. Drink more water. Moisturize. Take a daily vitamin.

None of these have been particularly easy to accomplish in my life. Some of these "easy fixes" are more difficult than others. None more than taking that daily vitamin. I found one I generally liked. I found one by the brand I like. I scanned the nutrition label to check that it contained the vitamins that I am lacking. I bought it. Everything seemed so easy. Until I got home and opened the bottle. They were horse pills! Not actually for a horse, but much larger than the Tylenol caplets that I'm used to swallowing. And the taste... It's a chalky, leafy taste that should not exist in any form. I dread taking my daily vitamin, so much so that it's not really a daily vitamin.

On top of the daily vitamin I sometimes take MSM, which is not the news station, but a supplement that promotes strong cartilage. It dulls any joint pain quicker than any pain medicine, but that might be a placebo effect. Today I decided that I needed to up my intake of Omega-3 fatty acids, in hopes to promote healthier skin. So I trotted over to CVS and bought a triple omega supplement. I thought the daily vitamin was bad! It's easily twice the size and thus ridiculously hard to swallow. At least it doesn't have that awful taste. Woo hoo to vitamins encased in gelatin! Woo hoo! It's been a few minutes and I can still feel the capsule making it's way down my throat. Uck...

I have to say that one of the things I like about taking a collection of vitamins is that I end up being much more hydrated. To swallow each capsule, I end up drinking about 1/2 a glass of water. Three vitamins later and I've had twice as much water than I normally consume each day. (I'll talk about why that is in a later post.) So yeah for hydration! Which is sort of the reason I'm taking the triple omega supplement anyways. We'll see how long this lasts.