Virtually Paul

You Should Be Using Less Plastic Bags

I have a confession to make. Since sharing a house with Nathan, I have become somewhat of an honorary greenie. I don’t know if anyone else had sat back and thought about this… but how many times do you accept plastic shopping bags from the supermarket when you don’t really need them? I used to do it all the time. Then I wisened up to the fact that it actually really is damaging to the environment. Now, I don’t really have the impact of that in my face every day - not in ways that I can easily notice anyway - so if you don’t really care about your plastic bag consumption, think about it this way…

Using plastic bags is incredibly lazy. It makes you into the worst of the worst as far as consumerism goes. Not only do you not realise how privileged you are to be able to shop in a first world supermarket… but you can’t even organise yourself to bring a bag along to carry your shopping home? Seriously, how hard is it?

The supermarkets will talk all about their ‘reduction campaigns’ where the checkout person will ask you before giving you a bag for less than 3 items. It never happens though. Numerous times I’ve had to be quite insistent with checkout personnel about not wanting a bag. So, seeing as the supermarket empires have their bottom line at stake and don’t want to stifle your affluent convenience, you’re going to have to do it yourself. Here’s how. It’s not that hard.

1. Get Green Bags
When you do your weekly shop, if you don’t have green bags already, buy them. If you’re not sure how many you need, start with two. I’m a single guy. I shop weekly, for one. I have three. If they go to use plastic, stop them and purchase another green bag. They keep them by the register to placate the greenies.
2. You don’t need plastic bags for most of your fruit and vegetables
Once you’ve got your green bags, as long as you keep them clean, they should be fine for transporting most of your large fruit and vegetable items without using those stupid little clear plastic bags that are impossible for males to open. Put your fruit and vegies straight in as you shop.
3. Make sure you’ll have your green bags next time
Take your filled green bags home. When you’ve finished unpacking the shopping, put your green bags straight back in the boot of your car. Two car family? Two sets of green bags. They’re cheap enough.

4. Train yourself to remember the green bags
If you forget your green bags, you need to remind yourself not to do it again. If you just left them in the boot of the car, the helpful staff at the customer service desk will be more than happy to watch your shopping for you while you go and get them. If you’ve left them at home, maybe you need to give up your favourite sweet food item this week so that you remember for next time. Doing something like that, while it’s a bit of short term pain, will quite likely mean that next time you shop, you won’t forget.

The Australian public doesn’t click with Jesus?

Apologies for trying to provoke your interest with the post title but something that I saw online today got me thinking big time.  I don’t know if you picked up the 3rd or 4th tier news story in the last couple of days about some church putting up a “Jesus loves Osama” sign out the front? (Matt Glover has already mentioned it.) Digger has a bit more to say about it as well but his site is in the middle of transferring to a new domain so I can’t link the post.  What you may not know is that on a certain quite prominent Australian website (which may or may not force itself to be the default homepage in the default browser on a popular operating system)… yes, well… a website, which shall remain nameless… ran a poll with the question:

Are churches right to say ‘Jesus loves Osama’?

Out of the 185,000 odd clicks that the poll had received when I last looked, I was unsurprised but at the same time kind of intrigued, to find that about 82% of respondents voted “No.” (If you’re a uni student, that’s a HD… so “No” did pretty well for itself.)

You wouldn’t have thought that something like this would surprise me. But it did. Maybe it’s the church kid in me. See, I’ve grown up in an environment where, even if people did an absolutely pathetic job of practicing what they preach, the essence of the Christian message - the Gospel of grace and forgiveness - was always something that I’ve been hearing about. It actually hadn’t occurred to me that most people actually don’t have the same experience. After 23 years as a church participant, I’m very accustomed to the idea of forgiving the undeserving and the guilty. In fact, if Jesus doesn’t love Osama, then he isn’t who Christians think he is. That’s how deep it goes.

C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity says:

Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.

I’m only just beginning to feel like I understand what it really means to “Love your neighbour as yourself”. I guess I expected more from everyone else. I guess I expected people to see that, as humans, we really stand to benefit far more from hating actions rather than hating other people.

Top 5 Reasons Why It’s Great To Be Single

5. Exclusive rights to the consumption of your own food
No one (unless they are just plain rude) thinks they have a right to share (read: steal) your food.

4. Transportational convenience
You can put stuff on your passenger seat

3. Efficient Task-Communication ratio
You don’t have to tell someone else what you’re doing all the time.
I really honestly don’t know how anyone can stand to be joined at the hip for large proportions of time. There are too many interesting things to do. Perhaps you have to find the other person interesting!

2. Prenuptial interrogative avoidance
No one asks you when you’re going to get married.
Well, no one above the age of 10 anyway.

1. Insufficient incentives for a paradigm shift
I haven’t met any girls who I’d gladly give those things up for!