Life with “The Others”

Many of you will remember the disappointing trip to Keukenhof last year. The short version is that when one goes to the “largest, most beautiful flower park in the world…with approximately seven million planted bulbs”, one does not expect to lots of money to see…a park full of stems.

So last year I complained to the park that they did not so much as warn us that there were no flowers before paying our money and going in, and (to my great satisfaction in the face of my European friends’ shock that I would do such a thing!) the park sent me free tickets for this year. So last Saturday, back I went.

So am I happy this time? Yes. While the tulips were just coming in and the famous colorful fields of Lisse were only about 15% in bloom, the air was full of flower perfume and 15% of color was enough to understand how devastatingly gorgeous it must be in full season. How special it must be to live in that city, at least at this time of year.

The park itself was about 75% in bloom…

Of course, you might notice from the last photo that for approximately every flower bulb in the park, there is also a tourist. The parking lot must’ve had 100 tour buses in it, and there were so many elderly people there we hypothesized that they’d been wandering the maze of the park since they were our age. We thought that after 1 hour we’d be in serious need of some Valium, but luckily the crowds naturally thin out at about 3pm.

So after 5 years trying to see the famous Dutch Spring, my persistence has finally paid off. And certainly there’s no better way to celebrate the season! While I am thrilled with my weekend, I am more determined than ever to see the blub fields in full bloom, riding my bike in the scented breeze. Hey…everybody needs goals, right?

My other obsession? Recycling. Forget the fact that I’d like to be environmentally responsible all the time but am woefully ignorant on some fronts. I never have the foresight in the moment to chose the wine from France over the wine from Australia because the French wine leaves a lower carbon footprint on the shorter trip here. And trying to research further just depresses me with confusion. (Which is worse, a company using plastic bottles that will rarely get recycled or using glass bottles that require 20x the energy to deliver the same service? *makes a gun out of her finger, points at her head and pulls the “trigger”*)

My political view on the environment goes like this: warming seems undeniable. (Sure there are a few scientists who doubt, but unanimous agreement is rarer than flying pigs, especially with different interests paying for opinions.) Is it caused by humans? Well…it’s possibly natural. The Earth has certainly seen it’s share of natural climate changes before. Still, is there any reason why we humans should not take the road to learning to be more responsible and caring for our planet? None. Besides, we’ll never know for sure until it plays out. If we take the environmentalist route and are proven wrong, the result is a more responsible society. (Oh, and some people have failed to benefit financially from continued irresponsibility. Boo hoo.) If we chose to ignore the environment and are wrong, the planet is destroyed (and thus are we). Seems like a pretty obvious gamble to me.

Anyhow, I get mad when I notice my neighbors throwing out gigantic trash bags full of cans, newspapers and plastic bottles. Here there is no excuse as recycling is easy, organized and handy. I feel tangibly guilty when I visit my father in the relative countryside (where there are no recycling facilities). Milk jugs, soup cans and juice bottles fill the trashcans in a jiff. I find this painful to watch, but at least he has an excuse. Left to my own devices you will find me on the floor amidst a pile of business envelopes, ripping the plastic address windows from the paper so that both parts can be recycled. (I know, I have a problem!)

I really admire the system that was in Leuven. There, waste will only be collected from certain bags. General trash in brown, compost in green, plastic in blue. Glass you drop off yourself elsewhere, though there is a fine if glass is found in your trash bags. The twist? “General” trash bags cost about $30 per roll. The recycling bags cost about $5 per roll. I find this extremely fair – you pay tax on the trash services you actually use and there’s a real incentive to recycle. I wish everyplace would be this logical. *sigh* Until that days comes, you’ll find me eating jars of leftover capers just so I don’t have to throw perfectly good food away. Hmmm, anyone know how environmentally damaging vomit is?

I have come to accept that I can be somewhat obsessive. I would have never realized this except for the symptoms pointed by by a dear old friend (see point #1). Now I see it everywhere, particularly evidenced by the triviality of the things I enthusiastically grasp onto.

The most recent obsession I see creeping up? Video advertising. It started with looking at those darn wedding planner websites. Every time you click on a page an advertisement floats down and opens up right over the article you are trying to read. I close it. I click to the next page, the same ad floats down. I click back to the home page. Same ad…After two trails with this one particular site and 50 clicks to shoo away some product I didn’t want, I became so incensed I emailed an irritated letter to the website feedback and never used them again (as promised). The one wedding website I occasionally use does something different. There is a box in the right hand margin which plays videos of wedding dress fashion shows or ads for registry services. It always starts automatically. You can click on the “stop” button, but this only works for about 4 minutes, then it over-rides your explicit instruction and plays again. Same for the mute button. So now I just have to mute my computer and ignore the movement. I find this indescribably annoying (although preferable to the ad that flops down over what you’re reading like a lonely cat). Suddenly, a number of my favorite websites/blogs have these video ads running. These things have the added irritant of the fact that they surely eat my bandwidth.

I won’t even get into the obscene amount of commercials on American TV, more noticeable now that I’ve grown accostomed to shows that are only interrupted on specific and limited ad breaks. But these internet ads are really making me cranky. Apparently advertisers are giving up on wooing the customer and going for bashing their faces in with their desperation to have you give them your money. But it’s just plain stupidity when advertising gets so obnoxious and insistant that you want nothing more than to dance gleefully over an oil barrel full of the product on fire. Don’t they do market research on this stuff? I got your focus group right here!

I’ve been quite the busy girl for the last couple of weeks. Packing boxes, seeing flowers, showing the apartment – oh yeah, and cursing because the sale of our furniture to the landlord fell through and now I have to sell it/get rid of it/whatever piece by piece. Aarrggg!

Anyhow, I’ll have a nunber of posts coming up any day now. Stay tuned!

Basically, I’m just posting this because, wow! A flight attendant for American Airlines was receiving an award and she took the ocassion to blast the airline, management and maintenace while onstage. (An interview with her here.)

As a flight attendant, I’m mixed on this. I think, good for her for having the guts to do this! Because the fact is that the airlines are run by greedy corporate suits. On the other hand, don’t be fooled into thinking that AA is the only one. They’re pretty much alllll the same. She could be talking to any one of them.

Still, I watch the interview with this woman and cringe just a little. I wished that she were a little more professional, a bit more eloquent as a speaker, a little less of an aggressive rambler. I can’t blame her for not being a professional speaker. She is not, after all, a PR specialist. Simply, she had some good things to say and I fear that the main message got diluted by lack of focus. I fear it’s too easy for viewers to say, “Oh, she just wants to cause trouble.”

I do agree that it’s an awkward place to make a stand. But…sometimes awkward opportunities are the most efficient ones. I don’t want to comment further, as that’s not what this blog is about. (I don’t want to turn into an “aggressive rambler” myself.) True, as flight attendants we do all have plenty of stories to fortify our soapbox. But that’s for late-night friendly debates. But for better or worse, I’m in awe. This woman’s got guts! Kudos to her.