Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Save a Tree, Take Your Sticks

I’m like Heloise with an attitude. Like her, I’m creatively conservative and environmentally conscious. Unlike her, I’m a geek.

One thing Heloise goofed on years ago was that https didn’t indicate a site was secure. However, hypertext transfer protocol over a secure socket layer is used for secure communications. She should have asked me.

But on the reduce, reuse, recycle course, I’m on her ride. I’ve been reusing things since I was seven, much to my parents’ chagrin. Maybe wastefulness was a sign of the ’60s and I was born too late or too early.

I have never liked misusing or trashing things, but I also don’t collect or save stuff I don’t need, such as food or relationships gone bad. As Tom across the street says, “When in doubt, throw it out,” and I do.

My weekday breakfast is NPR’s Morning Edition plus latte on steroids. Today a tree usage story piqued my cerebral branches. Take a look, particularly paragraph 10, where they mention chopsticks: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96758439. The world currently is allotted 61 trees per person. In America, I would presume we use much more than that, especially if a person eats a lot of Chinese food.


Next time I go to my friend Mei’s Hunan Springs restaurant, I will take my own chopsticks and not use the wood ones I’m offered. I may even take the metal Korean chopsticks my friend Brooks gave me, though food slips off them easier than with Japanese or Chinese chopsticks (筷子), and I like a mouthful.

So save a tree with me. Eat less and take your sticks!

copyright © 2008 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

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http://auntieeartha.blogspot.com/2008/11/save-tree-take-your-sticks.html

4 comments:

  1. I have a great job as a lathe operator in a bamboo chopstick factory. U used to work in the toothpick factory, turning the little grooves at the end of the toothpicks you get in sushi bars. If everyone takes your advice, I will lose my job.

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  2. Don't worry. No one ever listens to me.

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  3. Oh Auntie, I listen to you all the time! My day is not complete without my Auntie fix. I've been collecting chopsticks based on your advice. I get funny looks when I pocket those break-apart cheapies, but I will waste not!

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  4. Thank you so much for getting your “fixin’s” from me! And don’t you mind those funny looks. Could be they’re just unaccustomed to conservative folks, such as yourself!

    There are many uses for those wood chopsticks if you choose not to use them as fuel:

    • Take them apart, place them carefully under your upper lip, and pretend you're a walrus. Be sure to send a photo of your new self to me!

    • Stick them out of your back pocket and pretend you're an earwig. It's bound to keep those women at bay.

    • Paint designs on them, coat with shellac, and give them away as presents.

    • Make a tepee (tipi).

    • Sculp a splint for a broken pipi.

    • Or make a model airplane on a cold winter night.

    Thank you for writing, HotRod ; )

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