My job tends, essentially, to involve me sitting very still in an office chair for eight hours monitoring electronic representations of buses and listening to electronic approximations of voices poke unorthodox fun at each other, while random people (real ones, flesh and blood) constantly wander in and out offering me some of their food. My station is always surrounded by things like Hersheys wrappers, lasagna-sauce stained plates, grape stalks, trail mix crumbs, fake nacho cheese, crumbles from raspberry chocolate cake, burrito wrappings. If I could have begun to imagine the opposite of what working in Indonesia was like, this would be second only to being a restaurant reviewer for the New York Times. My current life is a health coach's reverse wet dream. (There must be an actual phrase for that, but that isn't what came to mind.) Sitting still. Stuffing my face. I sort of (wickedly) love it.

Wickedly not because of my cheating on my nonexistent diet or anything, but because I don't like feeling like the stereotypical gluttonous, wasteful American. But there's only so much one can say about that: but I bike, but I recycle, but I never buy new things, but this, but that.

I used to believe these excuses until I had to shower out of a bucket. Now I have the "luxury" of knowing that I could still choose to shower out of a bucket, and save untold gallons of water, but I also know that I won't. I believed these excuses until I had to walk up the street to pick up drums of gasoline and lug them back to the house to hook up to the stove.

How can you blame people for not changing if they can't forcibly feel the difference between what change isn't, and what change actually would be?

But I didn't mean to start writing about this. It's been said, and it's been said, and it's been said.