Laurel > Recent Status Updates

Wow! I think it’s best to read this book knowing nothing about it, just be along for the ride.

Now, this is good writing! First chapter bam bam bam. Good stuff, witty, vivid, succinct.

We don’t need a handful of people doing zero waste perfectly, we need millions of people doing it imperfectly.

Remember that plastic creates pollution at every stage of its creation, use, and disposal, regardless of the form it takes: packaging, park benches, artificial turf, fabric and more.

Each piece of plastic carries the weight of its origin, forged in the fires of expansion and extraction.

The only thing that’s actually being recycled is the myth that recycling will stop plastic pollution. The industry playbook worked in the 80s, on the eve of plastic product bans… [but] only 9% of plastics ever made has been recycled—because plastic is not designed to be recycled. The industry already knew this, and the gambit was as cynical then as it is now.

“Like a fast-acting laxative, it all came flooding back.” (a memory) 😂

Did you know women spend about $18k on menstrual products in their lifetimes??

Do you know what drug was starting to show significant promise for women’s pain during menopause, but then the study was ended because it ran out of money? Yep, Viagra.

“The reason I dreamed so big and do big things is because I forget about the constraints of reality for a bit and I go after what I want without considering what might get in the way. Many of us do the same. It’s one of our strengths”

Hacks: write a shitty first draft. Even include silly or extra metaphors or frameworks just to get ideas out (Harry Potter metaphors?!)

“Resparklize”: sometimes need to make old system or task more interesting.

Strike while the iron is hot

Do what you can ahead of time. Wear workout clothes to sleep

Remove obstacles: keep barrier log to figure out where getting stuck

Invest in tools you enjoy using

“I find that if I do something faster than my brain can realize I’m doing it, then it’s like a cartoon. I might be missing motivation slats on my bridge, but I’m just walking on air and not looking down.”

“You can’t fix the world,” she says. “You can’t fix time. People like us, we feel it too much. We want to fix too much. And, sometimes, it just swallows us up.”

And it’ll happen again, to someone else, at another school, during another police stop, at another nightclub. And we’ll all get angry. And we’ll weep. And we’ll scream for change. And we’ll march. And we’ll protest. And we’ll move forward. And then we’ll get tired and take our foot off the gas and slide right back…Over and over again. It’s a type of time travel that all of us are all caught in.

Over a lifetime, if somebody was to pull out the abacus and add up all those little leaky trots, I bet there was miles to go before she slept.

The only weakness that ever gave her grief, over her whole life, was her bladder. As the legend goes when she explains the story, she was born with the smallest bladder in the history of human existence. “A pecan with cracks in it,” is how she described it to him on one of their first dates, back before their daughter ever came into the picture.

I knew a woman who sneezed every time she orgasmed. I’ve shook hands with a Black president and watched Fury Road in the same afternoon. Yeah, kid, I’m someone who’s seen rockets break orbit! When folks come around with that old sales pitch about how things always gotta come up snake eyes in the end, well, I just let it pass me by. Nothing in this life is duty-bound to fall apart. Nothing.

But I’ve seen the back side of hurricanes too. I’ve seen lots of things. I’ve seen birds fight off bears the northern lights dance a jig over the Tuscaloosa. Seen a man get tossed into the air by an eighteen-wheeler and walk off laughing. One time I seen an alpaca riding shotgun in a Toyota Camry in the middle of Atlanta. I’ve seen 40 yr-old bare breasts dangled out of a Burger King drive-thru window…

“I’m tired of standing out. I’m tired of having to be small so that I don’t make waves and I’m tired of having to scream at the top of my lungs just to keep the world from swallowing me up. It shouldn’t be both ways at the same time. It just shouldn’t!”

Fuck Democrats. Fuck Republicans. Fuck conservatives. Fuck liberals. Fuck the Supreme Court. Fuck the red, the white, and the goddamned blue. Fuck it all. I need air. And fuck anybody that wants me to stay in a place that does nothing but suffocate me. I have no home, when you get down to it. No nigga does. And we don’t need one.”

“It’s just quieter,” Not Toni Morrison adds. “I go outside and, hell, when I hear something that sounds like a gunshot I don’t duck under tables. I know it’s just a car backfiring.”

Hell, a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet. And a friend is a gift you give yourself.

Maybe The Big Score can help me take out a thirty-year mortgage on this feeling of being able to breathe.

I see Lady Liberty standing tall. I smell the cinnamon of apple pies and hear the sound of home runs cracking the autumn air. I feel the concrete of the Hoover Dam…the gunfire at Sandy Hook Elementary.I see every cop that’s ever pulled me over I fit somebody’s description… Frenchie might have just helped me understand that, hell, for the right price, leaving America just might be the new American Dream.