Day 1: I Eat.

          Alas, my experiment in living sustainably for a week has begun.  To be honest, it is off to a difficult start.  I found myself feeling as challenged as Colin Beavan must have felt upon the first day of his living experiment when he woke up and, contradicting his best intentions of not using any new products or producing trash, used a paper towel to blow his nose.  I, on the other hand, was stopped short in my tracks when reaching for an Oreo for breakfast, as Oreos are far from included in the list of foods I can eat on my raw food diet.  Clearly, this whole 'raw food' thing was going to be much harder than I had anticipated.  I mean, really, no Oreos for a week?  No processed junk foods, cookies, ice cream, pasta, bagels?  (This makes me sound like a carboholic.  I ensure you, I am far from that.  I'm merely a distance runner, and little is more important to the running community than buttery pasta.)  Almost instantly, I realized that my outlook on this raw food diet was much too negative.  Instead of focusing on all the foods I couldn't have, I needed to focus on all the foods I could have.  I needed to convince myself that vegetables could, in fact, be fun! (Still working on that part. Asparagus will never be appealing.)  Regardless, I would have to eat them because not only did I want to fully experience the raw food diet, I wanted to experience it thoroughly in order to understand the challenges that face people who are so opposed to meat, vegetarianism, and even veganism that they are propelled towards raw foodism.  So then, I thought to myself, let's make some trail mix.  I opened my cabinet and took out all the dried fruit and nut supplies I had acquired for the week: dried apple, pineapple, cranberries, and strawberries, pumpkin seeds, pistachios, and these fancy chocolate raw food bars I had found at Safeway.  I emptied them all into the container the pineapple was originally in, rather than using a new plastic bag. (Note the consumption aspect of my previous blog--reusing things at least once before I throw them away!)  This still left me with 5 other plastic bags, though.  I solved this problem quickly, as I divided up my tub of trail mix into equal portions in the 5 other bags, one per day for the remainder of the experiment.  Thankfully, this was getting easier, as the other aspects of my day went well.  I went for a run, which went just swimmingly--somehow I managed to knock out 50 minutes, but at a moderately easy pace.  Also, I didn't need to leave campus today, so I made no negative impact in terms of transportation.

          Now, for the moderately embarassing news: The base number of times I checked Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter.  Facebook check: 26 times; Tumblr: 15 times; Twitter, 12 times.  And if I can just make an excuse to defend myself here, I'm working on a project for my Cross Cultural Communications class and my group members are being very ambiguous in terms of being anywhere at our specified meeting times and at answering any of my very persistent Facebook messages.  I expect this number to be lower tomorrow and throughout the rest of the week, and I'm excited to see where this experiment will take me in the following six days!