My Carbon Footprint Just Kicked My Carbon Footprint's Ass

(This is part three of a five-part series.)

Thing We Will Miss #3: Living a More Eco-Friendly Lifestyle

Living in Lithuania, in many ways, forces you to be kinder to the Earth. Scott and I don’t have a car, nor do we need one. We walk to and from school, or we use public transportation. There are local buses (the ones I wrote disparagingly of in an earlier post), and there are slightly more upscale minibuses that you can flag down wherever you want. There are also incredibly cheap taxis. Plus, if you want to get to any nearby-or not so nearby-cities, all you have to do is hop a train or a bus. Scott and I have not had to purchase one tank of gas since we got here. We haven’t had to get tune-ups or pay monthly insurance bills. Now, as we consider our plans for home, we realize that a vehicle is going to take up a large percentage of our monthly expenses. We’re committed to purchasing only one car, which Scott will use for work. I will be using the Ann Arbor bus system, a bicycle, and my own two legs to get around.

Lithuanian food, I suspect, is also better in many ways than food in the states. It doesn’t have to travel as far, and, as a result, it doesn’t need to be pumped full of preservatives. The food doesn’t seem to be soaked in pesticides either, judging by the fact that bugs can, and sometimes do, make their dirty little homes in our produce. This, although it might seem off-putting, is actually a good thing if you think about how many insects couldn’t get near your standard American apple without dying. When living things can’t live near your food, maybe you, another living thing, shouldn’t be eating that food. But I digress.

Not only do transportation and food live up to a greener standard; so too does our laundry. We don’t have a dryer, so instead everything gets hung on drying racks after it spends two monotonous (but energy-efficient) hours in our miniature washing machine. Of course, our laundry doesn’t always dry quickly because sometimes (like right now, for example) it is bitterly cold in our apartment. This is due to another “green” government strategy: When it gets up to a certain degree for a certain number of days, the heat is unceremoniously cut off, and regardless of the frigid temperatures that follow (and the fact that we’re still wearing three layers underneath our winter coats), there is no chance of the heat getting turned back on.

Thing We Will Not Miss #3: Living a Less Eco-Friendly Lifestyle

I have adjusted well, I think, to all of these changes; I would even say that I appreciate them if you don’t count my whining about being persistently cold or my drying off with a towel that feels like a thin slab of frozen concrete. But there are other elements that undo all of the good I like to imagine we’ve done.

When we first arrived, we quickly figured out which types of things could be recycled and began to faithfully collect and separate materials, just as we used to do in the states. Then I found out that everything we painstakingly sorted into the corner recycle bins was picked up by the trash truck and dumped in a landfill. Take that, Earth!

In addition to this, Scott and I, being practically illiterate in Lithuanian, often buy food that turns out to be unendurably disgusting. I am ashamed even to hint at the inedible goods purchased and then thrown almost directly in the garbage. One of our biggest problems is that we are both suckers for a picture. This is because pictures are the only things we can understand. Cute cow=dairy. Cute pig=pork. A couple of months ago, Scott was certain he had found patty sausage. You should know that no one else here in Lithuania has ever found patty sausage. Scott based this, yes, as you may have guessed, on an adorable drawing of a pig in a chef’s hat and apron. Scott is a sucker for cute pigs. I desperately hope that this is not a reflection on me.

“Chell!” Scott called, breathless with excitement. “I found it! Patty sausage!” He triumphantly pulled his find from the grocery bag. It was shaped like patty sausage. Plus it had a picture of a pig. Excited, we cut through the sleeve of paper. Underneath was a pink slab that looked like a cylindrical organ.

“It’s ham,” I conjectured.

“No, it’s spam,” Scott guessed. After cutting off the smallest piece, we discovered that we were both wrong and right. The pink slab was most likely an entire ham thrown, bone, gristle and all, into a food processor, then wrapped up like a giant Good n’ Plenty.

“I know!” said Scott, reluctant to admit defeat. “I’ll make ham salad! It will be delicious.” He mashed up the pink eraser in a bowl and put it in the fridge. Immediately our apartment took on the odor of salty pig mangle. Two days later, once our disgust had surpassed our guilt, salty pig mangle found its proper home in the garbage bag.

In fact, earlier today, this very issue sparked a heated debate. I was cleaning out the kitchen while Scott was programming on the couch. I had already had to throw a few things away, which notoriously puts me in a very guilty mood. In other words, I turn into mega-bitch. After finishing cleaning out the fridge, I continued on to the freezer where I discovered a family size bag of fish sticks. Neither Scott, to my knowledge, nor I had ever eaten fish sticks. Why, then, was there a huge bag of them in our freezer? I held them up in two hands and waggled them across the room at Scott, who was peering into his computer screen.

“What are these?” I asked.

“Ugh,” Scott said, glancing over. “Pitch ‘em.”

Mega-bitch reared her ugly head. I dragged the garbage can across the room and thrust the fish sticks into his hands. “No,” I said. “I want you to do this.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I would never buy fish sticks; I have standards.”

“I have standards, too! That’s why I couldn’t eat them!”

“Then why did you buy them?”

“I was hungry for something familiar!”

“And you couldn’t have gotten a smaller package? Or settled for something else familiar? Like an orange?”

“Fine! If it bothers you so much, let’s sit down tonight and finish them up, all of them, you and me!”

“No! Why should I have to eat fish sticks just because you, in a moment of idiocy, stocked up on a lifetime supply of them?”

Why, indeed?

The fish sticks, as you probably guessed, are no longer with us; they are heading over to hang out with salty pig mangle. I can only hope that the love we’re leaving here in Lithuania more than makes up for our piles of unnecessary garbage, but I do know one thing: No pig or cow or fish, no matter how cute or well-dressed, is going to lead us astray in the US of A.