Yesterday I got officially hooded as a Doctor of Philosophy!

Now whenever I publish anything about enviro-stuff, I can say it’s written by “Siel, PhD” — and pretend to be an academic expert on the topic. (My degree’s in Literature & Creative Writing)

From now on, I shall only answer to Dr. Siel. Actually, my degree doesn’t formally record until August, and my diploma doesn’t arrive until 4 - 6 weeks after that. So I’ll be just plain Siel for a while yet –

Thanks to my awesome friends for coming to the hooding ceremony and celebrating with me :)

Photo by Summer Bowen

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So it’s not green LA girl, but it’s still green girl — made into a lil vintage postcard ad!

Sadly, the blond-haired, green-skinned girl looks nothing like me — but the monster looks a little like the creatures that turn up in surrealist literature, which I wrote my dissertation on –

Thanks to Kevin McKeown, Santa Monica City Councilmember, for finding this at the 18th St. Coffee Shop and sending it to me :)

Maybe I should get my own surreal postcards made!

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To the kind readers who emailed to say you’re looking forward to hearing me speak at Green Drinks on Saturday: You are v. kind, but I will not be speaking.

To Hannah and other people who thought I’d be standing at a podium doing a Q&A for an hour: No, I will not be forcing would-be drinkers to listen to an hour-long Q&A on a Saturday night.

Here’s what’s actually happening. In celebration of the upcoming Earth Day, LA Green Drinks is having a special Saturday event at the Whole Life Times office downtown. You’re all invited, BTW:

When: Saturday, April 19, 7 pm - midnight
Where: Whole Life Times, 1200 S. Hope St., Ste. 300, Los Angeles.
Cost: $10 donation, which gets you organic beer, wine, and snacks. There’ll be live DJs too :)

Barent, the organizer, asked me if I’d come early and, during that first slow hour while people are trickling in, hang out behind a lil “ask green LA girl!” sign in the corner, so people with eco-related questions could ask them. Sure, I said. Can you make the sign? he said. Sure, I said.

Somehow, that was written up thusly in the Green Drinks email that went out:

Share in organic wine, beer, and munchies (and, yes, they are yummy!) along with DJs, Green LA Girl - Siel, and guest speaker Jonathan Parfrey, Director of Green L.A. (as well as other speakers)

This is when I started getting emails from people about how they look forward to my speech. I asked for a revision — and this is what went out in the second email:

Green LA Girl, Siel, will start the night informally answering your eco questions and Jonathan Parfrey, Director of Green L.A., as well as other speakers will bring us up to date on the efforts to Green LA.

7 pm Green LA Girl - Siel, informally answering your environmental questions
8 pm Green LA Director - Jonathon Parfrey followed by other speakers

This is when people started wondering why I was doing an hour-long Q&A.

Before that email went out, I pointed out this might happen — but it’s v. hard to convince people who think something is already clear that it only seems clear to them because they already know what the event is about. Try explaining the difference between the above with my suggestion — “the night will begin with some informal mingling over drinks and snacks, with Siel available to answer any eco-related questions and conundrums you may have” — without coming across as a nitpicky bitch….

Luckily all the people involved with Green Drinks are nice and, even though I still think the text is confusing, did try to mollify my concerns…. My main concern was that people would think, from the description, that this event would be a boring, hour-long Q&A, followed by one speaker after another — and decide not to come.

Please come — It’ll be fun, and you’re all invited.

Back to the nitpicky bitch thing — Yesterday I met a couple friends for happy hour at Bodega Wine Bar in Santa Monica. They’d changed the menu a bit — and I found typos! There were wines from both Fance and Framce; a nice reisling was being offered as well.

I pointed it out to our waitress. Oddly, she got really psyched about it, laughed, and went to show someone the typos right away. Maybe Bodega’ll get its money back from the printer? I dunno —

So you might wonder why this blog has so many typos and confusing sentences, despite my constant editing of other people’s work. Suffice to say most people find it hard to edit their own writing –

Photo by Don LaVange

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Pick up the latest issue (April 2008) of Whole Life Times, because a feature article I wrote is in it. Or, you can just click here and read it online –

“Spin Cycle: Real green goods or greenwashed sales pitch?” is about goods that first make the news about being eco-innovations — then make news again as not being eco at all. Which side is true? Read and find out –

The story’s also on the other mags affiliated with WLT, like Common Grounds, as well as on LIME.com — where I’ve started blogging once a week too. Check in every Wednesday for a round up on Green News is Good News.

Tags: wholelifetimes

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I’ve developed a bit of a shampoo obsession lately, perhaps due to my newish lemony-awesome, 1,4-Dioxane-free EO shampoo.

Now I’m in SHAMPOO, literally — or may be literarily? SHAMPOO, an e-poetry mag, just put up its 32nd issue — and a few of my poems from my hotel series are in it.

I first wrote about SHAMPOO over a year ago, referring to a few pieces of CAConrad — whose work happens to also be in this issue.

Enjoy clean hair –

Update, 4/4/08: A prob with the EO shampoo — the ranking’s ranking suddenly changed –

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Good Dirt Radio did a short piece on green blogs — and my voice is on it –

The piece is uber optimistic about green blogs’ role in the environmental movement. I’d say that my take on green bloggin’s not quite so utopian as on this show, though obviously, there’s a lot I heart about blogging :)

Here’s the mp3. Enjoy. And other green bloggers, lemme know your thoughts on the issue :)

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The latest issue of lit zine The Mad Hatters’ Review’s now up — and some of my poems are in it. All are from a longer series starring alice –

I like how The Mad Hatters’ review puts art AND music with writing. If you’re at work though, you might want to turn off the volume before clicking through –

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Sometimes my past selves haunt me, with feelings that now seem foreign, with thoughts and habits I no longer recognize.

Yesterday, while writing the Javatrekker post, I looked up posts I’d written about the Ethiopian coffee trademark agreement — and found I’d written DOZENS about this obscure issue. It’s like I seriously tracked every single story that came about the issue and added my two cents to each one. Some posts even obsessively catalog other posts, trying to organize them into timelines and FAQs.

Where did I get that kind of sustained energy? And more importantly, where the fuck did it go?

I’m not sure if I’ve become a shadow of my former self, or if my interests have simply shifted. In a way, this could be a good thing. Maybe a little less obsessive cataloging’s good for my soul.

But I can’t tell the difference between a neurotic obsession and a healthy passion and interest. There was definitely a time when I felt more passion about fair trade issues, about convincing others about the import of them, about dissecting these issues in writing. There was definitely a time when I felt more passion for a lot of things.

Those passions, it seems, have either faded and dulled. Or maybe it’s simply that I’ve explored them enough to sate my curiosity. It’s not that I don’t care anymore; it’s that obsession requires a mystery that no longer exists –

Or maybe the cumulative months of drinking have caught up to me and my brain is now not producing enough dopamine, or whatever the hell it needs to feel excited enough to explore and write about stuff. Maybe it’s the drugs.

Or maybe this is just how life is, a series of waves of different interests and obsessions and passing fancies. They all come and go, some lasting longer than others, but fading away nonetheless –

Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.

– Andre Breton, Nadja

Nadja gets cheerier if one reads on, BTW. And for now I’m gonna try to write a post about fair trade related stuff once a week –

Photo by feaverish via Flickr

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For Erin, who wants to cut back on the high fructose corn syrup intake: How To Beat The Soda Pop Addiction (via Lifehacker)

For Summer, who wants to have people over for dinner every week: I’m hungry.

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So it seems most of what we do to get happy doesn’t actually make us happy. Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, outlines some guidelines for getting happy in the Washington Post. (via Lifehacker)

The guidelines are pretty simple. For example, don’t break up the things that make you happy into parts that are so small that they no longer make you happy. “Breaking two cookies into quarters and eating one piece on each of eight days is likely to produce no happiness at all. Better to eat two cookies at once, and then wait a week before grabbing another two.”

Also, make decisions. “Keeping your options open won’t necessarily make you happier. And indecision makes you less happy than a bad decision.”

The lesson I take away from this: Don’t ration — just enjoy. And decide definitively to take more risks.

I’m not sure how to apply that to the drinking habit. Both parts seem to encourage binge drinking, which I already know is unhealthy. Hmmm….

Another overall message of this article seems to be that happiness comes in small, everyday forms. This means that even if something wonderful happens, the happiness that brings’ll only be temporary –

Somehow that makes me sad, but the feeling may just be alcohol withdrawal symptoms….

Earlier: The Happiness Trip

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