Small Consolations

I may be missing a sweet basketball game tonight, but at least I have Cannalope Haze to ease the pain.

So I got lost again today. And, actually, it was before I stumbled upon a coffeeshop I had been looking for for days, so that's not the reason. Come to think of it, I have gotten lost everytime I try to find this coffeshop (Grey Area, and I think the aforementioned 32 flavors song might really be more applicable to their product than to a clothing line). I blame it on the fact that every corner in the city looks the same and looks like a right angle. But it is an illusion: you are actually just making your way at great length and in expanding circles to the outside of the city. Round Heineken sign, crooked townhouse, cafe, flower stand, bikes, more bikes, canal, repeat. The other day I managed to go in exactly the wrong direction and ended up at a park on the other side of the city. And I keep finding things, in my wanderings, but there's no way I'd be able to get back to them. When I walked into the park, I thought, aha! So this is where Sarphati park is. Unfortunately, there's not a chance I'd be able to get back there. For all I know, things in Amsterdam move in the night. Perhaps they exist on some quantum level where there is only a certain probability they will be in any one place at any one time.

I've been trying to figure out what bothers me about these people. Is it the first two sentences? "Dinner was the usual affair on Thursday night in Apartment 9F in an elegant prewar on Lower Fifth Avenue. There was shredded cabbage with fruit-scrap vinegar; mashed parsnips and yellow carrots with local butter and fresh thyme; a terrific frittata; then homemade yogurt with honey and thyme tea, eaten under the greenish flickering light cast by two beeswax candles and a fluorescent bulb." Or is it this: "Isabella Beavan, age 2, staggered around the neo-Modern furniture — the Eames chairs, the brown velvet couch, the Lucite lamps and the steel cafe table upon which dinner was set — her silhouette greatly amplified by her organic cotton diapers in their enormous boiled-wool, snap-front cover." No, it could be this: "she did describe, in loving detail, a serious shopping binge that predated No Impact...It included two pairs of calf-high Chloe boots...and added up to two weeks’ salary."

You have chairs worth five thousand dollars and boots worth a week's salary: I'm going to stay sceptical about the "No Impact" fruit-scrap vinegar for a moment here.


The thing is, it's not like I disagree with these people politically or ecologically. I think it is a good idea to reduce our urban impact, especially as an increasing percentage of the population lives in urban areas. I think some of their "rules" are a little--or a lot--arbitrary: no carbon emissions for one year? So they refuse to take public transportation and won't ride elevators: imagine the categorical imperative applied to that one. I think part of it is the nouveau-Puritanism of a certain segment on the left. I understand the moral imperative towards being a vegan, for example, but sometimes I wished my vegan friends would also see that it is an immense privilege to be able to refuse food. The point is to live as simply--and as sanely--as possible, not to claim a position of moral purity. It's ultimately a dodge, a way around admitting that none of us are untainted. Living in developed countries is somewhat akin to Original Sin: we are thrown into a world where we are forced to sin against the Earth and to cause suffering to other living creatures. I'd like to see this realization of human imperfectibility greeted (on our side of the political spectrum) with a lot less self-righteousness and a lot more laughter.