The Five Dumbest Things Humans Do With Water

So, I think everyone is aware at this point that the world is running out of clean drinking water. And, if you didn't know about it, I'm sorry for drastically changing the way you brush your teeth (Hint: Turn the tap OFF when your toothbrush isn't under the water.)

So, let's talk about H20. Here are two water-related things I wrote to myself. I have no idea where I was going with either of them and this seems like as good a time as any to reveal them to the internet.

• During summer, a man came into my place of employment and asked me if we had any distilled water or if we only carried spring water. Since I have no idea what the hell(o kitty) distilled water is, I said, "I don't think I know the difference." Then he started going on about how distilled water is fully evaporated and then unevaporated or whatever the word for that is. Then he said, I kid you not, "I'm probably going to get in trouble for getting the wrong kind." Pardon? The wrong kind of WATER? That's close to the dumbest thing I've ever heard. (Note: Since I wrote this I have discovered that there are some breathing machines (or something rather, I don't know technical terms) that only take distilled water, but come on, science. Please. My apologies for being annoyed at this guy when more than likely this is all science's fault, as usual.)
• As a child, I ate a large amount of snow, which parents and teachers insist you do not do. But guess what? I'm fine, and all my friends who did the same are fine. And we were always very hydrated during the winter.

There, that was pointless. Now, let's turn this post into a list!

The Five Dumbest Things Humans Do With Water

Clearly this snow has
yet to be shoved into a pile.
That is a road, by the way.

5. Shovel it into huge, dirty piles. Yep, there's some precious frozen water, arguably the most important element on Earth, just shoved into a big pile mixed with gravel and mud. I don't really have a solution to this. Like, I'm assuming it's pretty pointless to ship snow across the world to countries that need water. And besides, snow is "dirty" apparently even though it's beautiful and white and sparkly. I mean, I know, we have to get it out of the way so we can drive and stuff, but is there NOTHING else we can do with it? It just seems like a huge waste, knowhatimsayin'?

4. Let children run through it/Slip N Slide on it/squirt it out of guns. I think there are people in this world who would weep to see the way that we waste water in the summer. I'm not saying that some of the best times of my life didn't involve a sprinkler or a squirt gun. I'm just saying that when it comes down to it, using fresh tap water to get revenge on your cousin for throwing you in the pool is pretty selfish and wasteful, in the grand scheme of things.

I didn't think a photo of me in the
shower would be appropriate,
so here's my adorable dog taking a bath.

3. Shower in it. A shower might not be so so bad if it was just an in and out sort of deal. I like to think that if you can use less water during your shower than it takes to fill up a bath tub, then maybe you've saved some. However, this doesn't count if you think about the fact that, as Laura Ingalls Wilder went into WAY too much detail about (I swear she was ALWAYS talking about bath water, jeez) there are times and places where people shared and reused bath water. Therefore, letting it all go down the drain, when most of it barely even touched you in the first place is actually a little bit crazy. This, plus the fact that, if you're like me, a shower is a time to contemplate all the world's problems and come up with good tweets. Why is a shower a better time for thinking than just sitting in a chair doing nothing? (Actually, it's because your brain is slightly preoccupied with something else. It's not really trying so hard to think about things, so you can come up with genius ideas. This is all accurate, I just don't have any real terms or definitions to back it up.)

2. Put it in plastic bottles and charge a ton of money for it. Ugh, this is where the thing about distilled water kind of comes back into the picture. Sometimes it's difficult for me to even wrap my head around the fact that people are allowed to sell water. It comes right out of the Earth, but even people who have access to it choose instead to buy it in a store for a stupid price. And there are all these different kinds(?!?) of water. There's classic spring water, which everyone believes to be just tap water, but I assume we'll never know the truth about that. Then there's distilled water. And this summer I started seeing oxygenated water, which is supposedly better for athletes because it prevents any bloating from drinking water or something like that (Personally, I think it's a trick to make people THINK regular water makes them bloated and less capable of doing athletic things, but what do I know, I don't do much more than walk and occasionally jog to catch the bus.) Then of course, there's carbonated water, which is all they drink in Europe and if you've ever read any of my Europe blogs you would know that I HATE IT. And I'm sure I missed a lot of other kinds(?!?), but come on people. Water is water.

Blurry, yes, sorry.
That's the risk you take when
you're a wildlife photographer.

1. Go to the bathroom in it. I talked about this in my Peeing In The Shower post earlier this year and again in Let's Save The Environment. Basically, what I said was WHY DO WE EXCRETE OUR WASTE INTO PERFECTLY CLEAN DRINKING WATER?!? It seems like cats and dogs have been hinting at us forever that we should be drinking out of there because they freaking love it. Like, I know cats who are excited when the toilet is flushed because they're reminded that there is delicious, cold water to be had in that big white thing that their owner sits on sometimes.

So, there you go. The weirdest thing about all this is that what we don't do enough of is actually drink water. Even in Canada where most of the world's fresh water is, a huge portion of the population is clinically dehydrated and they don't even know it. And, there's no way that I avoid doing all of these things. Just a few minutes ago, as I stopped to take a break to pee into some fresh water, I realized that my tap has been on just a little bit since the last time I was in there, probably a few hours ago. I am definitely just as guilty as everyone else, and frankly, until a war over water breaks out, I probably won't stop wasting it, because I'm a human, dam it. (Sea what I did there?)

Internet Bandwagons, Scams and Bullying

I wrote a blog post a while ago regarding Invisible Children and Kony 2012 on one of my old Tumblr blogs (you can read it here if you'd like.) The point of the whole thing was my frustration with internet bandwagons. People support a cause because it's popular to support a cause, or people post whatever because that's what is popular right now. They don't think about it, they don't do any research, and often it's something they cared absolutely nothing about before.

Recently, a young girl committed suicide because she was being bullied over the internet. The video she posted on Youtube about a month ago was truly heartbreaking and gave everyone a lot to think about. Since then #RIPAmandaTodd has been trending on Twitter, and Facebook groups have been popping up everywhere to honour her memory.

Note: The rest of this post is in NO WAY meant to be disrespectful at all to anyone. It's only something I was thinking about.
Internet bullying has been around for a long time. We've all heard about it, some of us have taken part in it and some of us have been the victims. It's easy to bully people online. You don't have to look them in the eyes. You can think about everything you want to say or do beforehand. None of this is in real time. In fact, sometimes what goes on online doesn't even feel real. There's just enough disconnection from the bully and the victim that it's easy to avoid feeling guilty.
So I was thinking, why is it that only when stuff like this happens, when a girl posts a message on the internet before she kills herself, that we step up and say we need to end bullying?
There are countless stories like this. Kids being so bullied that they don't even want to be on earth anymore. And every time one of these stories ends up in the news, people say, "we need to do something about bullying." And this lasts for about a few weeks. Facebook groups pop up, people join them and then that's that. That's all you need to do to support something, right? Share it on Facebook and then go about your daily life.

And it's not just bullying. Let's look again at this whole Kony business. One of the crucial steps in the whole Kony 2012 plan was Cover The Night - basically running around and vandalizing stuff with Kony's name and picture. I don't believe I saw one Kony poster the day after Cover the Night, although I saw so many people on Facebook claim they would be "attending" the event. People just simply forgot about it. It was too far down the road from their initial viewing of the Kony 2012 video.

But that's the thing about the internet, isn't it? Everything is changing, all the time. There's too much information going in and coming out, you can't just concentrate on one thing, and you can't show support for everything. So we join groups, like statuses and retweet messages, hoping that that'll be enough. Someone else can do the hard stuff. Someone else can teach the anti-bullying classes and send money to the children of Uganda.

And I do this too. I'm not standing on any pedestal, wagging my finger at the world for not being better citizens. It's hard to be passionate about things these days.
Not only that, but it's hard to know what groups, or organizations or sad stories are for real. There are so many internet scams created everyday. People make up sad stories and attach an unsettling photo from Google so that they can have their photo shared thousands of times.

So when things like youth suicide happen, and when the entire world knows about it, it's hard to not join the "bandwagon" isn't it? You want to seem sensitive and so you like RIP Amanda Todd on Facebook and you retweet some stuff about her.
But then you actually read some of the things on the group's wall and there are people being disrespectful there. Saying that the people who bullied her should "go die."
And all I can think is, "did you all completely miss the point?" Why did you join a group remembering a girl who wants to stop bullying, if you're just going to be rude and disrespectful (a bully) while you're there? Just because the person you're bullying is a bully, doesn't mean that what you're doing is okay.

I'm not against supporting causes, or joining groups. I'm against the complete lack of thinking that you see on the internet every day. And it's not anyone's fault necessarily. Like I said, the information being thrown at us every day is astounding. Processing it all is more work than most people even realize and so I guess it's understandable that maybe you post things without thinking, or like groups without understanding what they're all about.

In closing, all of my blabbering about bandwagons and scams aside, I hope we never have to see another news story like this. I know, bullying is something that will probably never truly go away. But we can change things and hopefully this is truly the push we need to do it. Bullying awareness is something that I always remember being a part of education (did anyone else learn the warm fuzzies cold pricklies story?) but maybe it takes a story like this one to really make it sink in.

Pet Peeve of the Week: The Difference Between "Seen" and "Saw"

I don't know if this is a common grammar issue all over the place or just where I'm from. I'm going to bet its everywhere. Now, I know that English is a stupid language. (This is a common thing found all over the internet but here's a link to the first blog I found. Hilarious, give it a read.) Anyway, the thing that baffles me is that people can't get their minds around the difference between "seen" and "saw." *disgruntled sounds*

The number of times I have heard "I seen that movie," I don't even know.

"I saw that movie," or, "I have seen that movie."
"David saw me at the park," or, "David has seen me at the park."

OR

"Have you saw that movie?" NO!

"Have you seen that movie?" Yes.

Now, I'm not an English teacher, so maybe I'm wrong, but how about we make a rule that "seen" can't be by itself? "Has" or "have" need to go with it. They're best friends, attached at the hip. But "saw" has no friends and should be all alone.

Or, I read this somewhere, and it made sense to me:
Think of the use of "seen" as talking about the past, but thinking about the present.
Think of the use of "saw" as talking about the past and thinking about the past.

I understand that this may be extremely confusing so let me put it this way:
"I seen you yesterday," doesn't even sound right!! Or is that just me? I understand that maybe some people just never learned it, or they never quite understood it, but I honestly don't think it's a concept that is too difficult. And maybe it's habit now. That's understandable as well. But bad habits can be broken. So let's break them before I start breaking things over the heads of these grammar murderers.

I will admit, I am an unofficial member of the infamous Grammar Nazis (although I hate the name. I would prefer Grammar Angels or something nice like that.) But someone has to be in charge of this stuff. You can't just go making your own rules about language. Wait, that's not a hundred percent true. If you know what you're doing (kind of) there's possibility for some creativity in language. But it's a different thing if you're doing it on purpose, right? Do I sound like an a**hole? Yeah, probably a little bit, but that's just how much this grammar mistake rattles me.

This doesn't mean I don't make grammar mistakes myself. I do it all the time. But I'm also constantly looking up the proper way to say things because I don't want to write posts like this and have people call me out on grammar mistakes that I've made.

I don't have anything to say to sum this up. Just stop doing it, okay? Just stop!

The Blackout

Frosh week. Get drunk. Do stupid stuff. Forget everything.

But why? Honestly, the number of Facebook statuses I've read about getting blackout drunk or whatever, it's ridiculous. Why is getting crazy drunk considered an accomplishment? And you're a loser if you'd rather have a few drinks over a game of cards.

Don't get me wrong here, I like to have a few drinks, and I've had a few too many. But I don't start out with the intention of getting out of control. Binge drinking is exactly why we can't have a lower drinking age here. People get out of hand, and people do stupid things, and that's why there's puke on the stairs of every res building every Sunday morning.

And I can guarantee you that the kid who puked on the stairs tells that story like it's one about him finishing a marathon or something. This is something I do as well. Why do we tell our drunk tales like they're something to be proud of.? They're kind of not. Just because you got drunk, doesn't mean you had a good time. And you can have a good time without being drunk. Puking, to me, does not equal a good time.

But yet there they are, the pics on Facebook of some chick with her head in your toilet. And it's the best picture ever! Clearly the best night was had if there was puking involved. And the next thing you know that chick has this pic as her profile picture. Why are you bragging that you poisoned yourself and had to vomit up all the shrimp you ate at the pub (in a nice vodka-y puke-sauce, probably)?

Here's the thing I don't understand the most though. It honestly baffles me every time I see it, and I see it a lot. "Blackout tonight." What? You're planning to have an awesome time and forget about it completely? What's even the point? You essentially just lost an entire night of your life, so what was even the point of going out? More valuable memories could have been made by staying home. That said, I think a lot of the time when people "forget" the goings on of the night before, they're lying. No, I KNOW that a lot of the time when people forget things, they're lying.

What's the point here? I'm not telling people not to party. I really don't care, I'm only questioning why partying is held on such a pedestal. Are you proving that you don't care? Are you going against society in some way? Are you looking for an excuse to hook up with someone? Or is it just attention seeking (This one has my vote. People who stay in don't get attention, so let's go out and let strangers take shots off our bodies.) Whatever it is, I think it makes our society a little sloppy and most definitely not classy. But my rant on classiness is for another day.



PS: I know it's been a while, but expect more content soon and more often. Sometimes your brain goes through a dry spell and you don't have anything to rant about. Weird, but it happens.

This Is Serious: Re-freaking-cycle.

Tonight we were on a mission. In Northern Ontario wildlife is everywhere, especially if you know where to look. Driving on the backroads near the dump, we came across a family of bears (we were in the car, of course.) This was adorable, especially because one cub was running around carrying a plastic container. Total YouTube cutie stuff, you know what I mean?

As it turns out though, the cub was not running merrily with a new toy. No, the plastic container was stuck right on it's head. We rolled the windows down, only to hear the desperate wails of the terrified little guy. To make it all even more heartbreaking, the bear ran blindly right into the side of our car. That sickening thump made everything worse. And there was nothing we could do.

So here's the thing, that little bear wouldn't have been in this predicament if some idiot had recycled his plastic container instead of throwing it in the dump or (even worse) on the road somewhere. Keeping a little blue bin outside your door is not a big deal. It's not going to kill you but as I've seen tonight, it may (more than likely will) kill innocent animals.

I keep telling myself "Winnie the Pooh got his head stuck in the hunny pot all the time." But this time Tigger won't be there to help the little guy and the Mommy bear won't let Christopher Robin anywhere near him. (Children's books often give the best life lessons, but in this case they didn't teach the unfortunate truth about real life bear's lack of knowledge about man-made items)

So "Shaaaame" (Mitch Pritchett, Modern Family.) Maybe think about it a little bit before you toss "just this one container, no big deal," into the garbage, because you may have just killed an animal.

This is a classic human fault. Who cares what happens to this piece of crap as long as it's out of your house ASAP? Recycling isn't all about cutting down on garbage or stopping global warming, etc. It can effect the world much sooner than you think it will.

And that's all I have to say about that. For now.

Marilyn Monroe Didn't Even Say That Stuff

Okay, so if you're an internet using person (which I assume you are because you're reading this), you've seen all the ... I don't even know what to call them ... posters? all over the place. You know them, they're quotes posted on a nice little background. Some of them are funny, some of them are inspiring and all of them are stupid (according to me.) "Whoa, whoa, whoa. I think those things are totally neat!" you're probably saying to your computer screen right now. On some level I agree with you, they're nice the first time you see them. But once they get shared a billion times on Facebook and Tumblr and copied to statuses and tweeted and instagramed (myspaced? Google+ed?,) this is when they get terrible and annoying.

But I can ignore the little poster things, some of them are pretty hilarious. But I can't help but think, "okay, who actually said this?" So, being the professional Googler that I am, I like to Google these sayings. And guess what? Apparently about a thousand different people are credited with saying some of this stuff. Wait, what? Yeah, imagine that. The internet, the world's largest "grapevine," has reposted and skewed these things so many times that no one even knows who said half of them anymore. I believe you people are familiar with the game Telephone?

Let's take the beloved Marilyn Monroe for example. According to girl's tweets and statuses everywhere, she has said some totally awesome stuff. And some of it may have actually come out of her mouth, but upon further investigation, most of it did not. Sorry to squish your beliefs ladies. (Side note: MM wasn't even a size 16, apparently. Of course, this info could also be fake.)

I know we'll never live in a world where we only quote things that we actually heard come out of someone's mouth, but think about how nice it would be, for the sake of the actual speaker. Am I right?
Maybe I'm just a little grumpy because I spend tons of time thinking up my own interesting (maybe) stuff to put on the internet while other people just spend their time sharing fake quotes that they claim are "totally the story of my life," or whatever (This is exactly the reason I'm writing this, don't let anything else I say fool you), or maybe I'm just worried about plagiarism and the rights of the author but either way, I've had enough of this unoriginal crap that is spewed all over the place without a thought for who said it, where they said it, what the context was, and if they were really talking about what you think they were talking about. (And that, my friends, was a run-on sentence.)

So, to sum this all up, let's all try to be a little more original, okay? Or at least appreciate the stuff the little people (me) have to say on the internet, because they're (I'm) trying their (my) best to entertain you with their (my) brilliant minds. And for the love of goodness, please stop quoting "Marilyn Monroe" and just appreciate her for being super hot or something.

25 Things I Would Rather Talk About Than Who Slept With Who Last Weekend

This is for my peers who (this shouldn't come as a surprise) are totally obsessed with gossiping about hookups. I, for one, do not care at all, and here's a substantialish list of things I would rather talk about than who got drunk and did something (someone) stupid.

1. Some funny things your cat did last night.

2. A new recipe that you tried out that you think perhaps I may like to try as well.

3. Your favourite flower. (mine is a daisy and I can talk about them for a good ten minutes)

4. The hilarity of 30 Rock.

5. The probability of aliens taking over the world.

6. The probability that aliens have ALREADY taken over the world.

7. Various cheese types, because there's a lot of delicious possibilities.

8. The number of times you had to stop and tie your dumb shoe yesterday. (For me, it was eight)

9. Some wildlife you recently saw/came in contact with.

10. Your favourite summer colours. Tis the season.

11. Words that actually sound super funny if you really think about it. Like "ear." Keep saying it. I know, weird, right?

12. Action movies.

13. Your dog's favourite chew toy.

14. Mythology.

15. The fact that you're wearing uncomfortable underwear.

16. Weird fruits.

17. The economy.

18. Bath salts.

19. The most comfortable shoes ever in the whole wide world. (It's a constant mission in my life to locate these and make them mine.)

20. A step by step lesson on how to make balloon animals.

21. End of the world theories/Government conspiracies.

22. How freaking cool beavers are. They are!!

23. A fun childhood vacation memory.

24. The weather.

25. Me. Mememememememememememememememe. Me. Obviously.