Treehugger Tuesday meets Meat Free Monday

(Treehugger Tuesday is much catchier than Eco-friendly Tuesday, don't you think?)

Today I'm pressed for time. That's because I'm writing that outline I was procrastinating yesterday. But I do have time to post this link, which is about Meat Free Mondays, a phenomenon I think may just overtake Treehugger Tuesday in terms of global popularity.

http://meatfreemondays.co.uk/

The Meat Free Mondays site is about going meat free on Mondays. Obviously. But it also provides a lot of useful information, such as why opting out of the huge-carbon-footprint-inducing meat industry for one day a week is a good idea, and how to go meat free and still enjoy your meals. Oh, and there are wine pairings. And a list of cool (and a few sort of uncool, depending on who you ask) veggie celebs. Like Paul McCartney. Who I at least think is cool. How could Paul McCartney be wrong, I ask you?

(Okay, so he was wrong about Heather Mills. And that My Brave Face song, which my dad has affectionately dubbed My Brain Hurts. But otherwise ... well, he's Paul. If I were a Beatle, I think I'd probably be Paul. I know it's more hipster cool to say you'd be Ringo, or George, but I'm going to be honest: I'd be Paul. I would not marry Heather Mills, but I would be a vegetarian. At least on Mondays.)

xo Marissa

Update: I'm not the world's leading slattern, and happy father's day to all

My dad just emailed to say he's been trying to leave a comment about my last post, but he can't figure out how. So here it is: (Since it's father's day on the weekend, I thought I'd do the old guy a favour and allow his voice to be heard ...)

Issa, I love your blogs! Being a moron, tho, I can't figure out how to post a comment. It's the ID thing that keeps messing me up. I was trying to post a comment saying how "even the great Bruce Stapley sent samples of columns to 50 papers in Southern Ontario before finally being taken on as a full time freelancer by the Stouffville Tribune while unemployed and STILL having Molly Maid come in to clean his sister's house where he was living! So you aren't the world's leading slattern afterall! Ha!"

Keep your chin up, Iss! We think you are a great, yet to be discovered writer!

Love, Dad

And there, in a nutshell, is my dad. He's the world's greatest, and I really mean it - the moron thing aside. He's also a great writer, and I can only hope I've inherited an iota of his talent.

Happy father's day, Dad -- and happy father's day to all the other great dad's out there, my husband included.

Have a great weekend!

xo Marissa

Not So Good Housekeeping

The kids are napping. I just made spaghetti sauce for dinner, cleaned the kitchen (halfheartedly), and folded laundry. (I'll be honest: my mom was over this morning and she folded about three quarters of the laundry, which I had artfully scattered around the living room in a pitiful attempt to get her to feel sorry for me and do it. It worked.)

I don't mind cooking, but I'm not great with housework.

I have an excuse, though! I'm a writer, and a freelance one at that. In the time it takes me to clean the house, I always tell my husband, I could write an entire article. It just doesn't make sense for me to clean for hours when we can hire someone to do the entire house for a fraction of what I charge for an article. (Sadly, that theory didn't really wash when I was writing the novel and we were paying someone to clean the house and take care of the kids a few mornings a week while I sat and wrote something I wasn't getting paid for. I unsucessfully tried to sell it as one of those Mastercard commercial vignette's:
A clean house: $60 plus tip
Occupied children: $13 per hour
A happy writer working on her first novel, unshowered and still in her pajamas .... priceless.)

I do wish I had a clean house, even if, as L.M. Montgomery might have written, clean houses provide less scope for the imagination. I also wish I were a perfect housekeeper, mother, and wife. I wish I could be the kind of mom who is more than happy, when her little darlings go off to dreamland, to scour the floor of harmful bacteria they might pick up as they crawl, bake them organic, whole grain, carob chip goodies, and plan a craft for when they wake up that's more inventive than slopping glue on a piece of paper and dumping dried chickpeas on top of the glue. (It's bean art! Lovely!)

Instead, the second the kids go to sleep, I throw the lunch dishes in the dishwasher, turn on CBC Radio 2, power up my laptop, and start to write.

Sometimes, I write emails. Sometimes, like today, I write blog posts. Sometimes, I write fiction. And sometimes, I actually write those paid articles I use as the excuse for being such a slattern.

I wondered if there were other writers out there like me, so I typed "writers don't clean the house" into Google.

On the first hit, a writer's blog, the writer was talking about how fabulously clean her house is when she has writer's block. "I know I'm not the only writer," writes Merrilee Faber, "who rushes to do the dishes and mop the floor when their subconscious is conspiring against them."

Um, uh oh.

Am I the only writer who, when I have writer's block, makes a cup of tea and reads a really good book? Or emails a friend a longwinded missive she doesn't bother to spell check? Merrilee was making me feel bad, until I continued reading her post: "Today my house is a vile pit of filth and disease, suitable only as a rancor den (but without the tastefully scattered bones)."

Ah, that's better. Mine, too.

xo Marissa

Holding the Baggie

Even though I penned a novel about an ecojustice lawyer who travels to Canada's Western Arctic to fight against offshore drilling and protect a beluga whale habitat, I have a long way to go before I can wear the What Would Suzuki Do? baby tee I just bought (in organic fair trade cotton, and dyed with vegetables) in public without feeling like a poser. (As it stands now, I usually just wear it at home, and my two-year-old points and says "Who's that man?")

I'm going to come out and say it before my book comes out and everyone just assumes I'm a valiant eco-warrior: I'm not the greenest person in the world. True, I don't drive -- but as much as I'd like to say that's because I'm trying to reduce my carbon emissions, the truth is, I just can't . I've tried. Taken lessons. Failed tests. Taken more lessons. I'm one of those People Who Don't Drive. Much to my husband, aka The Chauffeur's, chagrin. He didn't think it was funny when I asked him if he'd start wearing a cap and letting me call him Jeeves. (Side note: my Grannie didn't drive either, and she was a great writer, so maybe it's just one of the things I have to give up for my trade.)

Sure, I turn out lights, use those new lightbulbs even though I detest their greeny-blue glare, carry cloth bags when I buy mostly local and organic food, use natural household cleaners and cosmetics. I'm not going kid myself, though. Those things are easy. And the natural cosmetics thing is even fun, since it involves shopping.

I also take long, hot showers, even though I recently read that the amount of water a Westerner uses in his or her morning shower is the same amount a person in the Third World uses all day long. I impulsively purchase cheap clothes and shoes shipped from developing countries, the ecological implications of which I'm sure I don't fully comprehend. I buy imported wine, and lots of it. The list goes on. I'm no saint.

For a while, I thought I was alone in this world. I thought the green movement was all or nothing. Then I read Vanessa Farquharson's new book, Sleeping Naked Is Green.

Now I’ve decided to give up plastic baggies. (If Vanessa reads this, she's probably not going to be impressed. She made 366 green-minded changes over the course of a leap year that blow my little baggie project way out of the water, as it were.)

It's about more than baggies, though. I often ponder the legacy I'm going to leave behind for my children -- and I don't want that legacy to be hundreds of thousands of little plastic bags, languishing in landfills, bogging up waterways, choking water fowl and turtles, and otherwise wreaking all manner of havoc long after I've shuffled off the mortal coil.

So as of last week, I decided to store all my food and snacks and sandwiches and such in reusable containers from now until the end of time (or until my voice as a consumer is heard, and Ziploc comes up with a biodegradable baggie alternative, which is just one of the advantages of taking small steps towards sustainability. I learned this from Rob Grand, who owns and operates The Grassroots Store, and who I interviewed for an article last week.)

In characteristic form, I’ve been trying to find an easy way out of this thing, though. What I really want is to buy a brand new, full set of these.



But I can’t, because, of the promise I made my driver. Er, I mean, husband. He’s been so supportive of me this past year, and of my quest to become a published novelist - even as I've allowed my freelance writing career to take a back seat and focused on a project that has yet to earn us a dime - so I feel I should probably be more supportive of him, and his quest to Stop Spending Money So We Can Still Afford to Eat and Pay the Mortgage. (Also, he's probably going to read this, which means I really do need to tow the party line. Hi, honey. No, I did not buy anything new this week. I've had those red espadrilles for several seasons.)

The problem is, we still have some baggies leftover from a pre-baggie-embargo trip to the grocery store. And those teeny tiny plastic baggies are always peering temptingly at me from their oh-so-convenient open-top box, begging me to use them. “I'm right here, just a flick of the wrist away. And I’m so little,” they tell me in their sing-song siren voices. “What impact could I possibly have on the planet?”

How many baggies am I going to use in a lifetime? (I have no idea, you're saying, and nor do I care. Whoever this girl is, her blog is boring, and I am definitely not going to read her book when it comes out. But wait, I beseech you! I promise, I'm getting somewhere. Ahem.) So, let’s say I use two baggies every day for the rest of my life. And, let’s say, I live to be 85. (Yes, I’m being generous in terms of lifespan, but this is supposed to be a positive-thought provoking type blog, or at the very least not a depressing oh-my-gosh am I really going to die at 65, there are so many things I have left to do, questioning-one's-mortality type of blog.)

Right. So, plastic baggies. (And I promise, after I'm done here, I will never, ever, say the word baggie on this blog again.)

If I use two baggies a day and live to be 85, that’s 36,500 baggies. (Don't ask me how I got that total. Just trust me. I'm right. Or maybe don't trust me. I am a writer after all, not a mathematician.) And if I convince my husband to give up baggies (and promise him not to replace said baggies with an investment in a whole set of cute stainless steel containers, but instead use the storage receptacles we already have in the kitchen, i.e. glass pyrex bowls with lids and plastic food tubs for stuff I don't plan to reheat) I can double the number. (This is kind of like a fun game, isn't it? Um no, you're thinking.)

If my kids don’t use baggies anymore (and kids tend to use an awful lot of almost everything, so I think for a kid the number can be quadrupled, especially if I purge my home of all baggies until the little darlings move out… ) then that’s a damn lot of baggies. I'm not even going to try to calculate the number, lest my right brain and my left brain get in a fight and my head implodes.

The point is - and I really do have a point - two baggies, or even a temptingly convenient box of a hundred, is not a lot. But 100, 000 bags is. Giving up baggies means I’m not leaving all those plastic bags behind to not biodegrade, and instead off-gas toxically for hundreds of years. It's a small step, but it's getting me somewhere. Small steps tend to have that effect. Which I think was one of Vanessa's points, and an admirable one indeed.

(An added bonus: worrying about baggies is keeping me from checking email and voicemail every five minutes - which saves on carbon!)

xo Marissa

The Waiting

I wrote a book.

It's called Saving the World (In Sensible Shoes) and it's currently being shopped to publishers by my fantastic agent.

Which means, I'm going crazy.

Tom Petty said it best: "The waiting is the hardest part." It really, really is. Every morning, I tell myself, this might be the day a publisher calls my agent and says, "I must have this book, immediately, if not sooner! Get Marissa Staple-Poni-whatever-her-last-name-is on the phone now. We need to lock this deal down." (I have no idea if that's actually the way publishers talk. Somehow, I doubt it. But at the moment, I have no frame of reference, so the publishers in my head all talk like Texan businessmen.)

Every time the phone rings, my heart races, because I think it might be said agent calling to tell me of the aforementioned enthusiastic phone call from The Best Publishing House in the World. (That's what I'll call them, after they call.)

I check my email (constantly), and yet the dread of receiving a rejection is almost too much for me. The seconds that elapse between hitting send/receive and loading my messages seem like an eternity fraught with anxiety. I check voicemail endlessly, too. It's like waiting for the boy I like to call. Except that he hasn't called yet. Sigh.

(I'm not actually waiting for a boy to call. I'm happily married to a man who always calls when he's supposed to and says he doesn't mind playing second fiddle to my publishing dreams, or my talking constantly about my future book deal, or having to read endless drafts of my novel when he'd rather be watching Sports Line.)

I'm obsessing. An easy thing to do, I suppose, when the project I've worked on for almost two years and revised no fewer than eight times has finally been sent out into the world, all alone, without her mummy. I need distraction. Possibly, I need professional help. "What you need," said a friend, who is also a writer (but a published one -- she wrote this, and has another equally exceptional work coming out in the spring.)"is to start your blog, novel sold, or not sold. Who cares? Go for it!" (Or something to that effect. She probably didn't say "go for it". She probably said something much cuter.)

So I'm taking her advice. I'm going to use this space to chronicle my novel's journey from pre-published, to post-published, and beyond -- because frankly, this is the exciting part, even if I'm functioning these days on far too few nerves and far too much adrenaline. Maybe Tom Petty's wrong. Maybe the waiting is actually the exciting part. Maybe I should be embracing the heart palpitations and enjoying the dreaming and creative visualizations another novelist-to-be pal has encouraged me to practice. As in, I lie in bed at night and picture myself a renowned, accomplished author, and then one day -- poof! -- I am one. Right, so it probably doesn't work that way, but it's still fun. I bet David Suzuki always hoped to one day pose practically nude for the CBC. And then, one day -- poof! -- he was standing there with a maple leaf over his unmentionables.

(The protagonist of my novel has a small crush on David Suzuki. More of an intellectual one, really, but this photo definitely fans the flames. I, of course, do not. The only unrequited crush I have is on the publisher from whom I am desperately awaiting a call. Sigh.)

So that's me. A finished work of comedic women's fiction with an eco-twist waiting to be sold, and some extra time on my hands.

I'll keep you posted!

xo Marissa

Contact Marissa

E-mail: marissa@marincommunications.com

Twitter: http://twitter.com/marissastapley