To the sweet woman at the toy store in South Haven, Michigan, who warned me that there is a serial killer every 50 miles in the world:
I am home, safe, sound, and living.
I appreciate the concern, but really, I think the world is a much better place than what the television tells you.
Sincerely,
David
“Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear!” – Jesus, Mark 4
I lost my hearing in my left ear on Tuesday night.
I have been trying to wake up with the sunrise, which is currently a difficult task since it has been mostly cold, snowy, and cloudy for the last few days. I was in bed at 10:09 pm, reading a book called The Longevity Project, a study looking at a group of Americans, their life longevity, and what traits resulted in a long life well lived. My roommate began listening to music, the band was Jesus Culture.
I can’t read or sleep with music on even if it is soft and in the distance. I put my earplugs on. The problem came when I removed the earplugs.
When I took my left earplug out, I could see in my left hand how I had removed the earplug, but to my ear’s senses, I still had the earplug in. I was unable to hear. It was in this fashion that I went about a day and a half without hearing out of my left ear.
I was completely and functionally deaf in one ear.
What a perspective change! If you’ve ever worn an eyepatch, had temporary hearing loss, or had anesthesiology performed during dental work, you know how startling it can be to lose even one sense. In my case, it was only half of one sense. It still bothered me.
I had to ask people to speak up who were sitting next to me mumbling. I had to sit on my beautiful fiance’s left side when talking with her. The loud music in Chapel physically hurt for the first time.
After a short amount of Googling I learned quite a bit. Google is quite useful in simple medical assessments. There were two possibilities.
Option 1: I had built up lots of earwax in my ear over time, and due to my occasional use of earplugs I had pushed the earwax in too far into my eartube, and it was blocking my ear from hearing.
Option 2: The intense suction, coupled with the waterpressure of swimming ten feet under earlier in the night, caused my eardrum to perforate, or, in bloggers terms, to tear.
Even though my ear didn’t hurt, it was certainly irksome. It changed how I viewed everything, and I found myself rubbing my left ear in search of the high pitched scratching sound I could hear from my right ear. My ear didn’t hurt, and I didn’t think I had been brutal enough to tear my eardrum. Google was right, and so was the nurse in the Holton Health Center at Spring Arbor University.
I had a large buildup of earwax removed through a process called “ear irrigation”. I prefer combining the two words to be “earrigation.”
I can hear again, and I feel like I’m using my ears to hear at the first time. Even the short time of less than 2 days gave me time to appreciate what I have now.
It is a wonder, this feeling. But it’s also a tragedy, knowing in a few weeks I will forget this feeling.
Why don’t we have this sense of wonder every day? What do we need to do to appreciate our very existence?
I don’t understand why we don’t have this, and I also don’t really understand Jesus’ parable of the sowers in Mark 4. What is that supposed to mean? I love growing my own food, but what did Jesus mean in this parable?
Perhaps I will come to understand these things one day. I would like to. I want to use my ears to hear, to use my eyes to perceive, to hear, and understand.
Thanks for reading.
I finished my garbage experience last Friday. I know, it can be hard to find time to blog sometime.
I didn’t really end up with any more garbage than I had from my last post, update #2.
The reason is: I was required to collect, then recycle all of my trash for one week for my environmental science class. Kind of ironic, huh?
So, I should have collected more than I have right now. I’m just excited to finally throw this stuff away and not have to look at it anymore.
As part of the experiment I have begun to read No Impact Man by a Mr. Colin Beavan.In this book, a Manhattan local decided to go one year without making any impact by eliminating garbage, transportation, and electricity.
So far, so good!
So, I’ve been trying to figure out how I can eliminate basic wastes. Here are a few that I’ve come up with:
1) Bicycle more. This decreases the need for more stuff, more space, and less fossil fuel.
2) Carry a re-usable mug everywhere. This stops me from taking any tea, coffee, water, that is offered anywhere with an all-to-easy cup to dispose of.
3) Compost. I’ve started a compost bin. This isn’t my first attempt, but I’m hoping to actually get some dirt this time around instead of just nasty rotting sludge.
4) Buy less packaged food. This has been the hardest. Meijer really has nothing that is not packaged, including the vegetables. I think they used to have the bulk bins, but they probably had a problem with too many children eating cookies and chocolate covered raisins… now the nuts and grains come in plastic containers. They’re recyclable, but impossible to buy unpackaged.
5) Eat IN more. It seems like few people my age know how to cook. This includes me at times. I’m working to rejuvenate the art of eating in more and eating out less. It costs less, is more fun, more rewarding, and probably tastes better than Applebees and McDonalds anyways.
I have been following a friend of mine Katie Green, in her experience in Uganda. She went a week living without electricity and running water. What would happen if someone did that here to make a statement?
Photo from Katie Green’s blog. Uganda. Read her blog!
I’ve been reading stories of Gandhi, a firm actioner who didn’t wait for someone else to begin changing culture. Let’s figure out what impact we can have as individuals in improving the world, and culture that we live in.
As my African History professor said yesterday, “We are all agents of social change, whether we like it or not.”
Saturday I accidentally broke my iPhone. I created one piece of garbage out of my iPhone 3, which I have been using as in iPod touch for a little over 2 years. I went to open the iPhone and adjust/clean the audio slot for headphones that resulted in some major damage, rendering the iPhone useless. Oops.
Now I’m that guy, without a cell phone, laptop, or touch-screen device. Thankfully I’m still functioning, grateful, and alive. I’ve become much more aware of both how much I check this little device for text messages from Google Voice, and listen to music, as well as very much lusting and coveting other student’s iPhone 5s.
For this month, I am saving all of the trash I make for one month. I have 12 more days left of the experience. I no longer have a camera of any sort, except for my laptop webcam, with which I took this picture.
Garbage Update, after 3 weeks. Missing a few things like Subway wrappers and plates from a church potluck.
While this amount looks similar to update #1, you must realize that both of these boxes are completely stuffed, and overflowing with stuff.
A lot of the spacial garbage comes from food holdings. In fact, this is where most of my trash comes from. Milk cartons, juice containers, and soup cans. I can eliminate soup cans from my diet and only make soup from vegetables, where I will only be using a plastic wrapper to hold the veggies, or nothing at all.
I’ve still missed a couple of things. I did not include a wrapper from when Valerie and I went to Subway during an afternoon, or a paper plate I used at our church potluck because I thought it would be gross to hold onto food containers, with all their sauce on them. I like growing things, but not mold.
I’m thinking about the future ideas of this experiment. The most obvious next experiment would be to see how little trash I could accumulate over the course of a week, month, year. This would force me to begin thinking about ways to eliminate some of my trash.
Some immediate ideas I can think of include:
Eliminating Fast Food: All fast food, even Subway, carries a heck of a lot of packaging. I could, at the least, ask for less napkins.
Buying Less Soup-in-a-can: I like making soup, and I often use $1 soup cans as the base before adding additional veggies, noodles, or rice. If I just buy the veggies instead of the soup-in-a-can, I will probably eat more healthily, and know exactly how much salt I’m really consuming. The downside? Having to actually eat all of the veggies I buy before they go bad.
Carrying a Portable Mug/Thermos: Valerie pointed this out as numerous times I find myself filling up a disposable cup of coffee or hot chocolate before remembering , oh yeah, I have to keep that puppy.
Buying Less Stuff Online: While the boxes still exist behind the scenes in stores, this would eliminate a lot of the boxes and packaging that comes from my online purchases. And it is oh, so addicting.
Then again, it’d be good to just buy less stuff in general. To twist, mangle, and combine two Ben Franklin sayings, giving away an apple a day makes you healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Any suggestions on what I could or should be doing differently over the next 10 days as I finish this experiment?
It’s been almost a week since I started measuring how much I throw away.
The expected pieces were groceries, receipts, plastic bags.
For an idea of the kind of trash I expected, check out the beginning of this video.
But several times I realized I was drinking or eating something out of something I was about to throw away. My first reaction to this was, “Whoa, how did this thing get into my hand?!”
Both of these instances happened on Sunday, the sabbath of all days.
Sunday morning we went to church where I got coffee in a paper/plastic cup. The Spring Arbor Free Methodist Church shared their expenses for the year, and I couldn’t help but think how much of the $800,000 annual spending on worship went to the coffee before and after church, and the immediately disposable cups. As I finished the coffee inside the cup I held onto the cup, leaving it in my coat pocket as Wesley scanned Valerie and I into the DC, putting it in my grocery bag full of garbage back at the house.
The second incident happened while watching a documentary on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Office of Intercultural Relations was hosting the event, and they provided water in a styrofoam cup with deliciously salty popcorn in a paper bag. These too ended up in my grocery bag in my cupboard. I have yet to get a large garbage bag to hold this stuff from Ormston.
I thought I was doing pretty well until I got a box in the mail yesterday from REI containing a new and shiny green backpack. I was going to have to save this box, along with the other thing currently shipping to me in the mail: A pair of socks with a lifetime warranty.
Here’s the picture of my trash from the last week. Not too shabby, but it definitely contained a few surprises. I’d like to know how much garbage the average American creates per week to see how I compare.
This picture does not contain the veggie scraps I’m “composting” AKA “leaving in a plastic container outside in the 10 degree weather.”
I’ve made some goofs. I’ve thrown away tea bags, realizing later I should have saved them. I’ve also thrown away two cans, one containing garbanzo beans and one containing tomato paste. This next week I will remember to save these kind of items. I’ve also thrown away out of habit the food other people have given me. Last night, for example, someone gave Valerie and I a 1/2 of a pizza in a box I immediately trashed. For the next week I hope to save the tea bags, cans, and any garbage or handout someone gives me, directly or indirectly.
Thanks for reading!
