Earth Day, Shmearth Day

Today is Earth Day.  To be honest, I couldn’t care less, but it is.  I am, by no means, a rabid environmentalist.  I don’t care that much about recycling.  I do it because I’m “supposed to” and it has been made fairly easy to do.  Also, I drink enough Diet Pepsi, and pay enough California Redemption Value (basically a bottle deposit only on plastic and aluminum as well as glass, for those of you non-Californians) to make it worthwhile to collect it all up and take it to the recycling center once in a while.  Plus it keeps it out of the hands of the little old lady who wants to come by and dig in my recycle bins at 6:00 in the freaking morning on a Sunday! Do you have any idea how much noise all that aluminum and/or glass makes?

I’m not a conservationist.  I drive a hybrid, but I don’t do it because of the environment, though it does happen to be a “partial zero emissions” exhaust, whatever that means.  Seems to me like it’s either zero emissions or it’s some emissions, in which case it’s not zero.  Seems like an either is or is not kind of situation to me, but what do I know?  No, I drive my hybrid because I was paying close to $60.00 for a tank of gas that only lasted me 8-10 days in my SUV and now I pay about $25.00 for a tank of gas that lasts me nearly, if not more than, three weeks.  I drive nearly twice as far, on half as much.  To me that’s a no brainer.

Today is Earth Day and I could care less.  All the funny people on Twitter (and most of the not so funny ones) are talking about it.   Sarah and Vinnie talked about it on the radio this morning too, although actually, they talked less about it than they have in the past, for which I am exceedingly grateful.  The problem is they talked about it.   They are the first people to talk to me each day and they start talking to me before I’m really even awake.  From the moment they mentioned that today was Earth Day, I’ve had the Earth Day song stuck in my head, and I never even heard it this year.  Only I don’t know the correct lyrics, let alone the tune and so what keeps going through my head goes like this:

Earth Day

Earth Day

It’s Mother Earth’s Birthday

Earth Day

Earth Day

Let’s go have a beeeeeeer…

Since the song is sung by a chorus of children I’m pretty sure that’s not right, and I was actually quite surprised to find that when I searched for “The Earth Day Song” on Google, so I could find the correct lyrics and maybe even a link to the song for those of you sadistic enough to subject yourselves to it, there were dozens upon hundreds of different results, all of which were legitimate results and none of which were the song I was looking for.  You’ll just have to take my word that those are not the correct lyrics.

I celebrated Earth Day by printing about a ream worth of paper.  I decided that I wanted to have hard copies of all my writing, rather than depending on the blog sites (I’ve had a blog before this one) to retain my stuff.  I didn’t even finish.  Who knew I had written so much.  But I figure I made a nice enough dent in the rain forest for one day (plus my boss came back early from his “all day” meeting so I figured I should stop… for now.)

I came to work late today, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to do anything for the first hour anyway.  The furniture guys came back to replace the stand on my height adjustable desk.  A few weeks ago, I got a new desk that can be adjusted so I can stand up while I work.  I’ve actually found my self to be far more productive when I’m standing, but far more importantly – to me – my hamstrings will hopefully loosen up now that I’m not sitting down all day every day.  Also standing burns more calories than sitting in general.  The problem is the base that they delivered didn’t crank up high enough.  I was making due with it temporarily, but it needed to go up about five more inches than it did.  The sales guy says that they were shipped the wrong item from the manufacturer, but I can’t help but question that, since what they replaced it with is an electric base ($500 more expensive than what we requested.)  With the other base I had to turn a crank to adjust the height of the table, now I only have to push a button.  In actuality, this is better because when I do sit down (even though it’s a stool) the table is too high from when I was standing.  Now I can adjust the table height depending on whether I’m sitting or standing and it’s easy and quick.  But it is electric.  More electric, means more carbon emissions and all that good stuff.  Happy Birthday Mother Earth!

Speaking of carbon emissions and electricity, I’ve had my fan on all day because I’m hot.  I’m hot because my head is covered.  This past Sunday, while I was showering and preparing for my outing with Lil’B, after two and a half mishap-less years of cabeza shaving, I carved an inch long section of flesh right off the top of my head… literally.  Scalped myself.  I was able to extract the removed flesh from the blades of my razor and it looked rather like the end result of a bar tender extracting twists from the rind of a lemon; about a quarter inch wide and an inch long.  Fortunately, I shave in the shower because it bled and bled and bled.

I’ve been walking around for the last five days with a band aid on my scalp and I don’t feel like showing it off to the world – or fielding the questions – so instead I’ve been channeling my inner douche bag and rocking the backwards Kangol Hat, even indoors.  I figure I’ve got a couple more days before the wound is sufficiently healed enough not to need a band aid and then I’ll decide if the gash in my dome is too obvious to let people see or if I can leave the hats for outdoor attire.