Tag: humor
The 13 Stages of Zero Waste Living
If you’ve read my blog you know that I like to make Earth-friendly choices whenever possible. As it turns out, there’s a name for this trend called Zero Waste. It’s where people like me aim to reduce the amount of trash they create while making more sustainable choices overall. Looking at how my own habits keep changing, I made a list of the stages a person might go through on a Zero Waste Journey. Which stage are you in?
Stage 1
What’s zero waste?
Stage 2
You learn it’s about sustainable living and think, oh, I already do a lot of that stuff. Like recycle and shop at Whole Foods. So I’m good.
Stage 3
After watching your zero waste friends bring their own utensils to restaurants, you get inspired by them and want to adopt their crunchy, hippie chic ways.
Stage 4
Now once you start, you can’t stop. You’re shopping in the bulk section, composting, and bringing reusable bags to the grocery store. You are conquering this zero waste thing! Oh honey. Little do you know, you’re just getting started.
Stage 5
When you forget your reusable bags, you pack groceries in your purse and then take five trips to hand carry the rest to the car.
Stage 6
You shudder when you see plastic straws at restaurants. Upon seeing styrofoam takeout containers, you consider leaving a scathing Yelp review.
Stage 7
You put on a disguise when you go into a fast fashion retailer, hoping no one you know will recognize you.
Stage 8
You start buying clothes by looking at the fiber content and thinking, could I compost it when it wears out? Which fabric will eventually mulch my strawberries better-strips of organic cotton or wool?
Stage 9
You notice when your friends don’t compost and offer to help them learn how. Those banana peels aren’t going to turn into soil by themselves, Karla.
Stage 10
You start picking through the trash after your housemates throw away things that don’t belong in the landfill. Congratulations, you’re a basic zero waste bum now.
Stage 11
You break the ice at parties by starting conversations about composting toilets.
Stage 12
Coincidentally you don’t have as many invitations as you used to, but you don’t notice because you’re so busy making your own body lotion, toothpaste, lip gloss and non-toxic household cleaner, perfecting your sourdough bread recipe, weeding your organic vegetable patch, installing solar panels and tending to the family of goats you just bought.
Stage 13
While on vacation, instead of souvenirs you collect filthy plastic bags blowing around the streets of San Francisco to take home and recycle. Your family might refuse to be seen with you, but at least the ocean fish will respect you and be your friend.
How to Take Photos That Look Like Your Life Isn’t Falling Apart
Does your life look perfect enough online?
Recently a friend and I were talking about how perfect some people appear on social media. We know it’s not really that way of course….right?
She flipped on her phone. “Look,” she said, “See this picture I posted?” It was a beautiful new porcelain compost container photographed against the pure white tile of her renovated suburban home. “It looks like it’s from a magazine,” I said.
“Yeah, well it was the only square foot of real estate I could find that wasn’t covered in clutter, cat hair and dust,” she responded. Well, she fooled me with just one photo. And she fooled the forty other Facebook followers who called her a goddess from heaven sent to teach the people of earth about sustainable housekeeping.
Those picture perfect couples holding hands in matching flannel shirts still fight. Their beautiful smiling babies still vomit all over their work clothes right before they’re ready to walk out the door. And that friend #blessed with a promotion at #dreamjob still has days she can related to this:
How to use photography to make it seem like your life isn’t falling apart: A Definitive Guide
You, too, can have a picture-perfect life online. As a lifestyle blogger I’ll teach you what you need to know. The trick, my friends, is how to successfully curate your life to look good. To look like it isn’t…you know, falling apart. This might sound difficult to achieve but it’s actually really, really easy with just four steps.
Make it look like your life isn’t falling apart in four easy steps
1. Cropped AF. 90% of lifestyle photography is cropping the shot until there’s nothing ugly in the background. If the clutter doesn’t make it into the shot, is your house still a trash heap? The answer is a definitive no.
2. Add Sugar. Nothing makes your photos look classy like macarons, frosted donuts and cupcakes. This makes it appear as though you have nothing but time on your hands to sip a latte at a Parisian cafe and not worry about calories. After you take the photo of a single donut, eat the entire the box and tell no one. Calories don’t count if they aren’t Instagrammed.
3. Pretend to Love Minimalism. Uh-oh, people might start to notice that you’re wearing the same clothes in all your photos. Tell your Instagram followers you are creating a “capsule wardrobe.” This will make you temporarily forget the fact that you want to cry into your undone piles of laundry at night.
4. Use Creative License on Captions. “Great start to the day! I hiked a mountain and did yoga at the summit while the sun rose. #morningslikethese.” Caption your photos to successfully deflect away from the fact that you’re in yoga pants today because it’s a day that ends in -y, not because you actually worked out.
At the end of the day, we use social media to add beauty to a dark world. It’s reality mixed with a healthy dose of aspiration. So when you’re depressed about where your life is going, just scroll your own Instagram feed. You are a badass bitch who has at least one square foot of clean house, eats sprinkle donuts for breakfast, has a faux capsule wardrobe and did yoga once. Don’t let your real self forget: you are amazing.
Want more satire? Check out How to Shop For Baby Clothes.
Polly Pocket of the 1990s
In the 90s, there was a girl named Polly Pocket. She was an inch tall and lived in some pretty fancy little hinged plastic houses, leading an active life of skiing at Swiss chalet resorts, swimming in water park oases, attending school, and enjoying her many luxury properties.
As the decade drew to a close, Polly Pocket became larger (and presumably less of a choking hazard). Anyone who has seen the original 90s Polly Pocket will know that this change was an abomination. Polly is supposed to be about an inch tall and actually fit in a child’s pocket. Mattel has apparently put the toy line out of its misery for the time being, pausing manufacture in 2015.
After finding some of the original Bluebird Toys 90s Polly Pocket editions made in England, I was reminded that these toys were pretty genius. EBay and Etsy think so too! If you have any 90s Polly Pocket toys still in your possession, most are going for around $10- $30. I’ve seen some for closer to $100, but I’m not sure how fast they’re selling at those prices. Complete sets, the Disney collection and sets still in the packaging are being sold at $150-$500.
Polly Pockets Ranked in Order of Glamorousness
After photographing some 90s Polly Pocket sets in their natural habitats, I realized that A) Polly is super rich, and B) She kind of has many lives. I’m confused-is she one person or many? Does she just have a lot of friends, or multiple personas? While we’re waiting for an answer to this, let’s take a look at a few of the many diverse incarnations of Polly Pocket, ranked in order of glamorousness.
4. Ski Chalet Polly Pocket
Polly’s parents own several ski chalets in St. Moritz, including one just for Polly. Polly tells her friends back at boarding school that she’s an avid skier, but really she just takes a lot of selfies in the chalet, eats Muesli and doesn’t clean up her boots. It also appears in this photo that she lost her arm to frostbite in an avalanche.
3. Prep School Polly Pocket
Polly only gets the best, so she attends an elite prep school with a maximum enrollment of 3. How else would she get the proper attention for piano lessons, computer skills, swimming class and remedial math?
2. Tropical Resort Polly Pocket
Each year, Polly goes on a tropical vacation to a private island. It’s an educational trip to learn about ecosystems, but let’s be real: there’s totally a water park inside this island vacation house.
1. Rooftop Garden Mansion Polly Pocket
Polly Pocket’s mansion was decorated by a team of designers from Paris and Milan. The retractable roof garden is what makes it truly unique. It’s ideal for hosting brunch parties and was voted “#1 most Instagrammed mansion” by Polly Pocket Weekly. All the plants are grown organically and the mansion is powered by sustainable energy.
Want more throwback posts? Check out Ode to the 80s. And let me know your Polly Pocket memories in the comments.
Cat Bonnet Review
The last White Elephant gift you’ll ever need is here: the Cat Bonnet.
When I saw a friend from high school post pictures of her cat in a sun bonnet, it was eye catching to say the least. When I saw the packaging, I couldn’t stop laughing at its proclamation that “Cats love it!” The joke is, of course, that cats hate being dressed up in anything. Just ask any child who has ever attempted to dress her cat in doll clothes. It probably didn’t end well. Yet somehow my friend’s cat was wearing a bonnet and she and her boyfriend had lived to tell the tale.
I admit that I drove to the closest gift shop to buy one the next day just so I could report to you, dear readers, that the cat bonnet is real and not a myth. And there it was on the shelf! The shop happened to be GoodThings, but I hear Patina also sells them. If you don’t have those near you, think upscale gift shops that sell expensive cards, magnets with funny sayings to accompany vintage pictures and state pride wall art.
With zero shame, I paid $7.95 (“here, take my money! I need this cat bonnet in my life”) knowing full well it was last thing the cats wanted in their lives. We all know this “gift” was actually for me, but we’re pretending here okay?!
Do cats really love the cat bonnet?
When I tried the “100% cotton lined with satin!” bonnet on the cats, they didn’t hate it. I was, I’ll admit, shocked. They didn’t recoil or give signs of wanting to end it all. One of them seemed to actually…enjoy it. I put the bonnet on when each cat was happy and being petted, so I wasn’t chasing a cat around the room like a crazy person trying to dress it up. Because only crazy people try to dress cats up, am I right?! Ahem. Moving on.
The only one who really disapproved of the Cat Bonnet was the dog.
It’s a novelty gift, meaning it has no real purpose besides being hilarious. Sorry to disappoint you but your cat isn’t going to wear this around the house on the daily. You can get a few pictures in and that will probably be it (it’s been in its box since these pictures were taken). And while it’s mostly safe for the cat to wear if you tie it gently, you need to monitor the cat while it has strings tied under its chin. I recommend washing it first, because it had a weird chemical smell cats might not like. I do wish there were multiple fabric patterns instead of the generic beige calico. This will quite possibly be my go-to gift when I’m invited to a gift exchange or white elephant party.
Congratulations, your transformation into Crazy Cat Lady is now complete.
Here are some cat-tastic clutches and purses you might love as much as I do:
