drink the water, drink it down

[day seventeen: your water]

i'm weird with water drinking. for example, water is one of my top two drinks at restaurants. (logan's roadhouse has the best water ever. like ever, ever. i go there just for the water. chili's has one of the worst.) at home, though - at least in america - i don't do water alone. i drink crystal light (which is made with water) and then further dilute it with at least half a cup of water depending on the flavor. in the desert, i drink water alone all the time. i think it's the fact that the water there is cold while here it was always room temp. (my dad hates cold water.) the water in our apartment is in a brita filter thingie in the fridge, but i guess the no drinking water at home is a hard habit to break.

my brother's science fair project this year involved testing water. he was basically comparing tap, filtered, and bottled water. he found that not only is bottled water bad for the environment, it is also rarely any different than tap. plus, it doesn't follow the same regulations as tap water since it's technically a food item. he was just testing the ph levels, nitrate/nitrite levels, hardness, and alkalinity, but it was still interesting. evian water was the farthest from the recommended levels on everything. filtered water (brita) and dasani were pretty similar and probably the best.

on a different note, these downloadable dust jackets are my favorite thing today. they're a great way to tell people to leave you alone with your book without having to come out of your fictional world to tell them.

*Drink the Water - Jack Johnson

and my eyes don't recognize you no more

water and i have just not been on the best terms for the past couple of days. i don't know what it is, but i've been having one embarrassing moment after another when it comes to water these days.

let's start with yesterday. we went out to have dinner at red lobster's after the longest day of waiting around ever. (we were at my parents' house waiting for the tv/internet installation guy. he was supposed to come between eight and twelve. he came at three:thirty and didn't leave until seven:thirty. i finished my book by ten:thirty, played sudoku for hours, did puzzles, played whatever one person board game type things i could find, made a bunch of peanut butter crackers i did not want to eat, and wandered around the house like a lost soul. it was a long day.) anyway, so we're at dinner and i'm just about done with my popcorn shrimp when i realize that i'm really thirsty and the waitress hadn't come back with my refill yet. so i take my fork and go to pick up an ice cube to suck on (when i was little my mom used to yell at me for using my hands.) when, instead of cooperating with me, it flew out of my cup and landed in the little thing of cocktail sauce on my plate.

whatever, i thought, and finally got it in my mouth - cocktail sauce and all. while i was sucking on it, the manager came around asking if everything was alright. i don't know why i felt compelled to answer, but i did. and after i got out my "fine, thanks" the stupid ice cube jumped out of my mouth, that's really the only way to describe it. it jumped out, bounced off the table, and landed on the booth next to me. somewhere after the point where i realized my ice escaped and before i saw it use the table as a diving board, i was simultaneously pulling an ostrich and dying of laughter. it was not my best moment. (it's times like these that make me doubt the fact that i'm actually twenty three and not seven.)

today, i was sitting on the couch drinking a cup of water and awkwardly reading a book while waiting for my nail polish to dry, when i somehow spilled a little water on myself. this caused me to pull the cup away dramatically, consequently splashing myself with a little more water. two seconds after i laugh about this with my husband, i go to take another sip. i spill more water on myself. i splash myself with more water. my face was soaked.

this morning i was filling up the brita filter and moving it back into the refrigerator. on its way over there and into its spot, it decided for some reason to just spill a bunch of water everywhere. i'm still not sure how it did this because it was still full when i put it in the fridge and it was not leaking anywhere. it just wanted to escape.

so, like i said, water and i are just not on the best terms at the moment. i think it might be because i've started drinking ridiculous amounts of water and my body is tired of it and staging a protest. but really, it's like water is now a completely different person. someone i have never really known, and i'm not sure if i would have wanted to.

*For Reasons Unknown - The Killers

do it for the living and do it for the dead, do it for the monsters under your bed, do it for the teenagers and do it for your mom

i remember having a conversation with two friends last year about drinking water from the bathroom sink. one said she did it all the time, the other thought it was the grossest thing in the world. "i'm sure it's clean... enough, but ew. i don't drink tap water," was how she described it. while we are discussing the possible grossness of drinking tap water, 38,000 kids are dying every week because they can't get any clean water to drink, which, by the way, was declared a human right by the UN. a lot of people i know, including my friend, drink bottled water instead. (the US, Mexico, and China use more bottled water than anywhere else, with the US using an average of 200 bottles per person per year. 86% of these are never recycled. read this for more bottled water information. there's even a video to watch at the end of that page.)

now, i'm not telling you all to stop drinking bottled water and switch to tap (or buy yourself a brita filter) to save the world (except that i totally am). instead, i'm just going to open your eyes to a few ways you're spending water every day that you probably didn't know about (i know a lot of these came as a surprise to me):

[one] charging an iPhone uses up half a liter of water (power plants don't run on love). on an average day, a US power plant will use 500 billion liters of fresh water. (can't grasp how much that is? well, it's more than double what flows through the Nile.)

[two] look at you're outfit. it takes 1,800 gallons of water to grow enough cotton for one pair of jeans, and 400 gallons of water to grow enough cotton for a plain cotton shirt.

[three] think about what you eat in a day - the normal stuff. that is all using way more water than you think. it takes 200 liters of water to produce one cup of milk, 140 liters for a cup of black coffee (53 gallons to make a to-go latte), 185 liters to make a bag of chips, 135 liters for an egg, and a whopping 2,400 liters for just one hamburger. (and no, i'm not talking about a big mac or a triple whopper with cheese.)

[four] it takes 39, 090 gallons of water to make a car. each tire requires 518 gallons of water to be made.

when you're using that much water without even realizing it, do you really want to waste extra water by not turning off the faucet while you brush your teeth or taking showers that span hours?

interesting fact: more people have access to a cell phone than a toilet. (that means water is getting contaminated with sewage.)

interesting fact number two: unsafe drinking water kills more people every year than all forms of violence, including war.

why the sudden interest in water? it's Blog Action Day and the water issue is this year's topic. it's a much bigger issue than you may think (you know, if you live under a rock or in a cloud of self-involvement or something). so make yourself useful and get off your computer that is using way to much water to be powered and go dig till you find a spring or well or something. or, you could just spread the word, try to use less water, and maybe donate to a water cause?

*Loose Lips - Kimya Dawson