New Year, New Challenges

 

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYBODY!

My first week this year is not very unlike from last year’s. Again, I have come up with a list of resolutions and try to stick to it as much as I possibly can. And again, I know I’ll probably lose most of my newly gained applaudable character traits by the beginning of next month.

Anyway, I won’t give up without fighting and sharing my resolutions with you might just give me the little bit of extra motivation I need to stick to them.

I believe new year’s resolutions should help you and make you feel good about yourself. Therefore, don’t simply write everything down that has bugged you these past months,  but choose resolutions that you can also realize easily with just a little bit of discipline and extra effort. At the same time, this means that you don’t put yourself under pressure or be too harsh if things don’t work out exactly the way you planned. Allow yourself to make mistakes.

Please, let me present my NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS 2020:

1. Sustainability: Live as zero waste as possible. / Only buy fruits and vegetables in organic grocery stores. / Try to save as much food as possible. / Only travel by plane if there’s no other option.

Although I try to live as sustainable as possible, there was a number of times last year when I went for packaging simply because it was the easy choice. There were times when I decided on eating out knowing that I had food in the fridge which – as a result – might go bad. I was responsible for five return flights, four of them I took myself. “That’s Whataboutism,” some of you might say and you’re right. I know that I’m only human and I’m allowed to make mistakes. And I know that I made a lot of good decisions as well. But there’s always room for improvement 😉

2. Education: Read at least 60 books. / Watch the daily news to stay updated on world events and politics.

Although I study literary studies, nowadays I don’t read as much for pleasure as I used to do. With college reading lists and long working days, watching Netflix (from now on only a single episode a day!) often seemed so much easier. The pile of unread books in my apartment is unbelievably high (#3 on my bucket list – Buy a book after running out of books – might be the least likely to happen of them all). And I won’t even start on the gaps in my political knowledge…

3. Career: Write something (anything creative) for at least half an hour a day. / Don’t procrastinate.

Similar to my former reading habit, I don’t write as much fiction as I used to. Hope this will change in 2020.

4. Social Life: Be a better friend.

There are a lot of reasons why I want to be a better friend this year. 2019 saw me directing a play, working three different jobs, taking classes and spending the evenings with my boyfriend. This didn’t leave much time for my friends and I simply hoped they would understand. Some of them did, some of them didn’t and they were right not to. When my sister got pissed at me for never texting her back, when my cousin told me she was sad because I was never free to meet up, when one of my closest friends didn’t tell me about her new relationship and my best friend said she wouldn’t have called me when she needed somebody to talk, I was hurt. I was hurt and I felt wronged and I thought that I had had good reason not to be around. At first. Later I realized that I used to be a friend you could rely on and in 2019, I was not.

5. Health: Do some sports.

Well, I won’t comment on this one. Just do some sports, girl. And climbing stairs doesn’t count!

6. Home: Get rid of everything you don’t need. / Only buy things you need.

At the end of last year, I tried to get rid of a lot of stuff in a short time. I started by throwing out one piece at the first day, two at the second, three at the third, until day 25. It did work out to some extent (my boyfriend would disagree!) and I feel my apartment is much more comfortable now. The problem is, that – unlike many other people trying to declutter their lives – I hate to throw things away. Producing garbage simply clashes with my idea of sustainability. That’s why a lot of the items I wanted to get rid of went into a box under my bed instead where they are still sitting waiting for me to either sell them (looking forward to all the flea markets in summer) or find somebody to give them to. I hope 2020 will be the year!

 

 

Why I Don’t Want to Eat Like a Gilmore

Pizza, Burger, Chinese Take-away, Donuts, Muffins, Pancakes, Pop-Tarts, Ice Cream… If I had to choose the one thing that baffles me most about the girls, it’d be the amount of fast food they stuff into themselves without gaining any weight. I remember this one weekend with my Dad years ago – I guess, I must have been 12 or 13 – when we couldn’t decide on what food we’d get. My sister wanted a McDonald’s hamburger (gross, I know), I was craving for this one particular Chinese curry dish and my Dad thought about getting Pizza. In the end, he was driving to three different places getting three different kinds of food. One of my favourite Dad-weekend memories and a true Gilmore Girls-moment.

As a big fan of Kristi Carlson’s Eat Like a Gilmore and her follow-up Daily Cravings (though by now I cook my own veganized versions of her recipes), I started to ask myself:

Would it be great to actually eat like a Gilmore?

For many reasons my answer to this question is no. Yes, I’d love to be able to eat four Thanksgiving dinners and snack some rolls on the way home. I’d love to order tons of Chinese food and try a little bit of everything. And I’d love to check out all the hot delivery guys in town by ordering from 10 different places at once.

But there is one thing that simply drives me crazy and that is the amount of food and packaging they’re throwing away. Surely, it’s only a show, but isn’t Gilmore Girls working as a mirror of the modern American society? And even worse: hasn’t it become a role model to millions of fans, to people just like me who have been growing up watching the show?

By presenting its main characters as inconsiderate consumers and contrasting them with crazy health fanatics such as Mrs. Kim and Michel, the show runners imply that wilful waste is chic. While Mrs. Kim confronts her daughter Lane with an excessive use of tofu, Michel is even counting the blueberries in his morning pancakes. Add in Coach Bennet, the only vegan in the show, who is – to say it frankly – pretty scary. Luke’s healthy lifestyle becomes inauthentic by the simple fact that he’s selling dishes he’d never touch himself. Sookie, at the same time, does not want to ‘waste’ her talent on vegetarians.

Lorelai and Rory are wasteful, not only with food, but also in their consumption of fast fashion, the countless take-away cups containing their beloved coffee or Rory’s vast number of trips between London and New England without ever considering her carbon dioxide footprint, to only mention a few.

RORY: This is just wrong!
LORELAI: What?
RORY: You washing two socks!
LORELAI: They were dirty.
RORY: That’s wasteful.
LORELAI: I really wanted to wear them tonight.
RORY: They are your dancing Santa Claus socks. You’re not gonna wear them for another ten months.

Don’t get me wrong: I love love love Gilmore Girls and I’m still binge-watching the show. However, sometimes when you grow up you begin to question even the things you love.  And just as I realised that Lorelai’s and Rory’s social behaviour isn’t flawless making it easier for me to like characters such as Dean, Christopher or Richard and Emily, it seemed necessary to question their consumer behaviour. (By the way, which single mother could afford eating out three times a day?)

We constantly want more from life and while I agree that we should constantly strive for happiness, freedom and love, I believe we have to stop trying to compensate our dissatisfaction with consumption or put love and status on a level with materialism. Emily, for example, goes shopping when she is discontent with her marriage while Logan expresses his love for Rory by buying her a £32,000 bag (unpopular opinion: a really ugly bag).

Gilmore Girls is a beautiful show with amiable characters and a lovely story, but why is there no American show with normal ecoconscious characters? Why do the Coach Bennets and Phoebes of today’s modern TV shows also have to be weird or eccentric, even childish? Why does it have to be cool and funny to go on a quest for the best burger in New York as Marshall did in How I met your mother, ignoring the fact that firstly, they’re wasting food animals had suffered and died for and secondly, that Marshall is supposed to be fighting for the environment.

Well, Marshall, start by consuming less meat!