Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Filing Personal Moral Bankruptcy
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2005 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Via Kottke. What does it mean to be organic? The people who want to buy organic usually also want the food to be produced by a small, local, independently owned business or co-op that is environmentally friendly. But if all you look for is "organic" you might get stuff that has no pesticides but otherwise doesn't jibe with your principles and desires. The CEO of Whole Foods seems to have the right idea regarding organicity in depth.
I subscribe to Planet Organics for a fruit and vegetable delivery every other week. I just give Leonard all the groceries and he cooks dinner and invites me over all the time. Today Leonard and I went wild customizing the standard order to exclude some unwanted items (persimmons, eggplant, lettuce) and increase the vegetable : fruit ratio.
In the new year I should eat better -- more greens, fewer processed foods -- but I probably won't. But Leonard's nutritious food is getting to be the staple of my diet and we try to keep each other honest about sweet-eating.
Right now he's making brownies. New Year's is a special occasion, right?
I never feel prepared for a new calendar year. And I feel as though I have no cred with myself to launch a New Year's Resolution. I still feel as though 2004 is the future.
Now the brownies are in the oven and Leonard is playing a melancholy singer-songwriter tune on the guitar and the rain is really falling hard on his freshly planted rhubarb in his back garden.
I feel as though the attempt to live an ethical life, or to discover relationship compatibility, are like Peter Sarnak's bit about Andrew Wiles fixing the bug in the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem:
PETER SARNAK: And every time he would try and fix it in one corner, it would sort of - Some other difficulty would add up in another corner. It was like he was trying to put a carpet in a room where the carpet had more size than the room, but he could put it in in any corner, and then when he ran to the other corners, it would pop up in this corner. And whether you could not put the carpet in the room was not something that he was able to decide.
The brownies smell great. They are familiar but exciting. That's how we get through the disorientation of January first - friendly stimuli that coax us through the membrane of midnight into the new year.
Happy New Year!
They're done!
