Greenbean.

I’ve lately been trying to be more consciously green. And by green, I do mean environmentally friendly. Not… green-colored.

I guess it’s that whole ‘practice what you preach’ idea. I talk the talk, so I gotta walk the walk. I… shit… ran out of cheesy motivational slogans after only two. I’m so bad at this.

Anyway.

The Veterans and I recently went to see "The 11th Hour", Leonardo DiCaprio’s answer to Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”.

Mmmm, Leo.

I’ll never let go, Jack! I’ll never let go!

It was a good film but one line from it has stuck with me more than any other message it tried to impart. That is, use your vote. And remember, your dollar is your vote. So only buy things that you feel ok about buying. Meaning, if you don’t like sweatshops, don’t buy sweatshop clothes. If you don’t like corporations, don’t buy from them. If you don’t like fast food chains, you really shouldn’t drink their strawberry shakes. And if you don’t like cigarette companies, you gotta stop getting drunk and bumming those Parliament Lights.

As we left the theatre I told Matt the Veteran how that was the line that stayed with me, and how I was going to make an effort to really start buying only products I felt ok about. And not just clothes, but all products.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “I mean, Christ, your shower is full of Suave bottles. Suave!”

“HEY!” I countered. “Suave is only 99 cents!”

I swear to God that’s the last time I let that dirty-ass hippie use my low budget shower.

So with a fresh paycheck in my pocket, I stopped downtown on my way to the hospital to check out the latest at American Apparel and The Body Shop.

Using my vote at American Apparel is a debatable choice. After all, they don't support unions and their CEO has more than once been accused of sexual harrassment. But in the end I let the fact that the clothes are American-made override my dislike for all that, and for their pedophilia induced advertising campaign. I needed a couple solid colored shirts, and decided that the six or seven times I have cringed at one of their model’s crotches spread over the back page of the Weekly was not quite enough to cancel out the fact that there would be no sweat shop guilt upon leaving the store.

[At least not until 2009, when I strongly believe a scandal will break and we will all discover we paid $75 for leggings stitched together by blind grannies in the ghettos of Bagdhad. Or some shit.]

I dropped about two thirds of my paycheck there, and then traveled on to the Body Shop where I dropped over $20 on shampoo and conditioner ALONE. Yup. You heard me. From $2 on Suave to last me a month, to over $20 on little bottles that will force me to wash my hair only every three days. I clearly should have skipped the Body Shop and simply gone to City Market. No wonder hippies dread their hair. Green products are just too expensive.

And so at the end of my green shopping trip I found myself with one cute outfit, four or five showers worth of hair-washing, some face wash, and about four dollars left in my pocket.

Thank god Erin is in the hospital this week. Because if I didn’t have her patient room service to mooch off of, I’d be living on ramen.

I would end this by saying ‘it ain’t easy being green’ but that seems way too cliché.

And oh wait, I guess I just ended this by saying that.