The No More Cosmetics Pledge

Jan 15, 2013

Hello, and welcome to this week's post.  Today I'm going to talk about a subject that is near and dear to many women's hearts, my own included - makeup and haircare products.  I was reading an article by Meghan Murphy the other day that discussed the use of cosmetics as being a function of the patriarchy.  In other words, because marketing execs have sold women on the idea that their natural appearance is not good enough, thus the multi-billion dollar business that is cosmetics is born.  You can read Meghan's article here:
http://feministcurrent.com/6995/at-long-last-tom-matlacks-opinion-on-your-face/

It got me thinking about the thousands of dollars I have spent in my life on cosmetics and hair care products without even noticing, a perfect illustration of how the pyramid scheme we call capitalism works:  Virtually every woman on every tier of the pyramid buys beauty products, sending a massive amount of money upwards to the companies that mass produce these oftentimes toxic substances,  who test them on animals, and who as usual, package them in plastic and truck them all over the world.  The owners of these companies then horde all that money they've cashed in those resources for, rendering them useless to anyone but themselves.  Doesn't seem fair, does it?
The world has a finite number of resources, and they are being transformed into products that marketing execs have convinced you that you Absolutely! Must! Buy! to be pretty.  In turn, when you buy them, it turns those resources into a dollar amount which the super-rich sit on and hoard.  And in order to perpetuate this process, these companies saturate society with the message that women in their natural state are not good enough, so that we are ashamed to go out in public without makeup on.
 Could it be that makeup companies deliberately undermine women's self confidence?  Let's think about Loreal's current, "Because you're worth it" slogan.  The message underneath of that one is 'go ahead, buy our hair colourants (dump a ton of chemicals down your sink into the water table too by the way, but we won't get into that one) because we all know your natural hair colour looks like shit.  You don't want to go around looking like shit, do you?  You're worth the twelve dollars! So do us all a favor and spend it on altering your lacklustre appearance!" And none of us even stop to question it.
Shortly after I read Meghan's article I was sitting with my good friend Steph and as usual, admiring her hair because it is the most ridiculously soft-looking, healthy long hair I`ve ever seen, and I`m like, "What do you use to get it to go like that, Steph? and she's like, "Nothing."  I couldn`t believe it.  Acting all nonchalant, I was like, "Yeah, I try not to use my blowdryer or straightener too much either, because it's so damaging.  I just use volumizer and smoothing serum" and she just looked right at me and said "I dont use any of those things because they're all full of alcohol and they dry out your hair."
I tried to keep a neutral face on, but I was inwardly thunderstruck.  Here I am all these years hating my hair, complaining that it's too dry or too damaged, putting in highlights and colourants, buying all these different products trying to find the magical one that will 'fix' it and then I go and ask the one person I know who's hair always looks great and she tells me she just washes it and lets it dry naturally. Well you know what?  I`m trying it. 

 

 

That's when the idea for the No More Cosmetics pledge came in.  Readers of Self Sufficiency, I hereby pledge that I will not purchase makeup again until all of the stuff that I have is used up.  I also pledge right now to stop using product of any nature on my hair except for shampoo, and that means going back to my natural colour as well.
It's a daunting prospect, but I think I can do it, and whenever I get frustrated, I'll just simply refer to the following table to reaffirm my dedication:
Me minus Thousands of dollars = dry, damaged hair
Steph minus zero dollars = beautiful, healthy hair. 
I estimate that prior to now I spent $30 per month on volumizer and serum alone.  That's a fairly hefty investiture.  Now that I'm not buying it anymore, over the course of a year, it's going to save me $360 if I stick to it, and guess what folks?  Since that's one week's mortgage that I'm stealing back from capitalism, I think I'll be sticking to it.  Yoink!
 

I have been going without volumizer and serum for three days now, actually, and already I'm finding that my hair seems softer.  It doesn't even look that frizzy, surprisingly, and when I wake up in the morning it's not immediately evident that I need to wash it.  I'm starting to wonder if that so called dirty hair look was actually just a build up of products.  Gross!
What's more, it's taking less shampoo to lather my hair, meaning that I'll go through way less of it over the year, another excellent example of how just saying no to the demands of capitalism (and therefore the patriarchy) pulls money back off the escalator. 

No Garden Patch update today, but I'll add my $30 savings on haircare products to the $54.16 that my husband and I have saved by his not buying lunch and arrive at a total of $80.16 as our total year-to-date savings through the initiatives discussed in this blog.  Not a bad total for fifteen days' work.  See you next week!

Further Useless Enterprise: The Proposed Medical Marihuana Amendments

January 8, 2013
With all of the known damage that Carbons are doing to the climate, I'd like to suggest that the time has come for us to limit what I call Further Useless Enterprise, or in other words, manufacturing businesses that serve no productive purpose but the creation of wealth for their owners.  As I alluded to last week, we have enough environmentally damaging transport truck traffic as it is serving our existing commercial businesses, we don't need any more.  What we need, instead, is tougher sanctions on who can open up production businesses and why. 

 

That's where limitations on Further Useless Enterprise would come in.  Before being granted a license to open production businesses that manufacture items, companies would have to pass a certain 'usefullness rating' to prove that what they want to produce is actually necessary in terms of Earth's sustainability, because at this point anything that isn't useful merely speeds us up in the race to the end of the resources.

 

The Canadian Government's proposed Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations (MMPR), open  for public comment until Feb. 28 2013, is a document that details the needless creation of one such enterprise.  I put a link below to the incredibly long and nearly impossible to find page of the Canada Gazette where the MMPR is published in full, but for now, let me give you the highlights:
Under the current legislation, people that have been given approval to use cannabis for medical reasons (predominantly cancer or chronic pain paitients) can apply for licenses to either grow their own plants or designate a person to grow for them.  Until now, this has been a surprisingly self sufficient policy on the Government's part, in that the people who actually need and use the product produce it for themselves with no packaging or shipping involved.  It's no wonder the Government is in such a hurry to amend it.  What the MMPR wants to do is take that system away and have them purchase the substance - at a whopping five times the current price - from companies.  They want to make medical marihuana into a production enterprise, with all the shipping, packaging, facility-building, and resource burning that entails.  The MMPR states that "The analysis assumes a price increase from an estimated $1.80/g to $5.00/g in the status quo to about $7.60 in 2014, rising to about $8.80/g with a corresponding average annualized loss to consumers due to higher prices of approximately $166.1million per year for 10 years."

To rephrase that paragraph in layman's terms, users of medical marihuana are generally on the 'bottom rung' of financial status.  Many are too ill to work.  They are living on the income from their benefits, and the government proposes to take ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-SIX MILLION dollars from them over the next ten years and give it to commercial businesses.

The MMPR claims three so-called reasons for doing this: indoor grow ops are fire hazards, they are mould producers, and the threat of violent home invasion to steal the goods exists to users.  Because of these risks, the MMPR states that patients are better off purchasing their supply from companies.
The report also comments that if medical marihuana continues to be grown on residential properties, lawmakers are concerned that it will make it's way into the illicit market.  I argue that if companies grow the product, that risk still exists.  If I was a criminal intent on stealing someone's medical marihuana, I think the onerous nature of waiting until their crop is ready, breaking in, stealing X number of large and heavy plants, bringing them home, cutting and drying the bud and disposing of the evidence would be a far greater deterrent to my crime than merely waiting around their front porch until the neatly dried and portioned package shows up from the growing company and running off with it.  Yoink! 

In December, the CBC published a statistic that in 2011 in the province of B.C. alone, around 3000 people were convicted of marihuana possession offences, which in turn cost the Canadian taxpayer God knows how much to patrol for, arrest, process through the court system, and incarcerate these people.  If the government would just simply release the ban on marihuana, (apart from the stipulation of growing it inside if that's so important to them), since after all even they  have acknowledged it to have medical benefit, all of that expense to the taxpayer would be eliminated.  They could take all of that taxpayer money and release it back into the incessantly cut public services like health care and education, institutions that are actually important to Canadians. Doing so would eliminate the need for indoor grow ops, since if everyone could grow it, the price would fall so that indoor grow ops would not be worth the effort.
 
For the purposes of Self Sufficiency, if there is a plant that I can grow myself that produces a pain-relieving effect, I would like the option to grow it.  It might just eliminate the need to purchase plastic encapsulated, chemically derived OTC pain medications, and think of all the little money bags THAT would take off of the up escalator of capitalism, not to mention how many transport trucks it would take off the roads.
One final thought: Canada is still technically a democracy, although the Harper government often makes that difficult to notice.  If you're going to open up a substance to be grown for profit by commercial businesses, then why continue to keep it illegal for the individual?  Doesn't seem fair to me.

If you would like to read the proposed MMPR regulations, you'll find them here:
http://gazette.gc.ca/rp-pr/p1/2012/2012-12-15/html/reg4-eng.html

and here:
http://hc-sc.gc.ca/dhp-mps/marihuana/future-avenir/index-eng.php

If you would like to give the government your opinion on the subject, you can do so before February 28, 2013 by email at:        consultations-marihuana@hc-sc.gc.ca



Vegetable Patch Update
The Strawberry seeds had a kind of disappointing performance as far as germination goes.  I only got one tiny sprout.  It's tough to see in the picture, but it's there.  However, I took it, and the remainder of the moistened seeds as well, and sowed them in a repurposed yogurt container with holes punched in the bottom and set it in the window sill.  I don't know if this is the appropriate method or not, all I can do is hope for the best. 




Sandwiches All the Way
Thanks Jackie, for your comment, and yes, you're right, I do intend to cost out the price of the lunches that I send from home and subtract them from the total spent last year.  Last week's lunches, however, were leftovers from the turkey dinner that I made on New Year's Day, so as far as a cost figure that I could reasonably arrive at, it's hard to do in that I would have spent the money on the turkey, etc. regardless.  For fairness's sake, I'll cost each meal of leftovers at $2.50, and since he only worked two days, that makes for a total of $19. 77 that we saved over the course of week one.  For week two, his total spent was $34.16.  Stay tuned next week fo the results of the savings once we cost out what he's had.

Week 1 - January 1, 2013

Greetings, fellow citizens of Earth, and congratulations on surviving the recently forecasted apocalypse.  It's wonderful to be here, and now that the world hasn't ended we can all breathe a sigh of relief and move forwards.  While the doomsday predictions proved inaccurate this time, we can take them as a wake-up call and realize that the time to live our best life is now.  For me, that means turning my back on the Rat Race, a way of life that was exhausting for me, and for our planet's resources as well. 
Each item we buy as consumers represents a dollar value that as soon as it leaves our hands, embarks on a long, uphill journey to those at the top of the food chain.  Take that coffee and sandwich you buy for lunch while at work.  You hand over your meal's total, in this case, ten dollars.  Imagine that sum as a burlap money bag with ten loonies inside it.  Has kind of a nice weight to it, doesn't it, those ten shiny coins sliding around in that sack?  Kind of too bad you had to part with it: in comparison, doesn't your paper bag of starchy bread and foamy processed chicken seem like the far less desireable thing to have?
Yet because you have purchased it, that small bundle of cash has begun it's ascent up the escalator. Now I don't know who's up there, waiting to collect it, but whoever they are, the chain of events they've set in motion in order to position themselves at the recieving end of the money bags all of us down here send up to them involves some pretty damaging procedures: the carbon-emitting transport trucks that bring goods from supply plants, for example, and the chemical processes that convert raw materials into cups in the first place.  Now I know that those processes provide people with jobs, and I used to be one of them.  It's not for me to say whether the system is right or wrong, I'm just doing whatever I can to get out of it.  Our whole way of life is built on the principle that anything goes as long as there's money to be made, but that isn't sustainable.  It's a race to the end of the resources, and nobody's really talking about what happens when we get there.
If you are, like me, concerned about these things, I strongly encourage you to become as self sufficient as possible.  I'm talking about financial self-sufficiency, as you will see below, but I am also talking about taking active steps to produce your own food to reverse some of the upward flow of money.  In the event of a devastating recession or natural disaster that interrupts our food supply, wouldn't it be nice to have a nice little cushion of self-sufficiency to fall back on?  Follow me over the next 52 weeks as I update you weekly on how successful my attempts at self- sufficiency become in the following categories:


The Vegetable Patch:
In this section, I will update you with photos and progress reports of food bearing or perrennial plants, a variety of which I am starting from seed in the first few weeks of the year.  I hope to chart the success of the different varieties and different growing spots inside my house.  Because electricity is a commodity and using it to aid in growing would send some of my money back up the escalator, I am only using the natural light that exists .  To grow the seeds, I will be re-purposing yoghurt containers which I have been washing and saving over the past few months.  This project begins with my strawberry seeds.  In the spring of 2012, for $1.27, I purchased a small strawberry plant from a local nursery.  The variety was 'everbearing,' and I took it home and stuck it in a pot on my deck in direct sunlight.  I watered it a little, and to my surprise, it produced delicious and tasty strawberries from July until November.  I was quite impressed by the yield of this one little plant.  Every few days I would get a handful of berries from it.  I wish I had weighed each yield, because I'm sure that a tally would have showed that I harvested at least two pounds of berries.  At the end of the summer, I took the plant out of the pot and split it into two, which I then planted directly in my garden.
 I also kept the last ripe strawberry.  I let it dry in a saucer on the windowsill, then I broke it apart and put it in a container in the freezer.  On Jan. 1, 2013, I took it out and scraped the seeds off onto a wet paper towel. 

This picture shows several loose seeds, plus the remnants of the berry which I then folded into a sandwich bag and placed on top of my microwave.  Stay tuned next week to find out if any have germinated, and follow them as I plant them in my garden and track how much fruit they produce.




Sandwiches All the Way:
To give people a little background, my family is able to get by (barely) on what my husband's job brings in.  Now that I have given up my 'day job,' I only bring in what I earn as a freelance writer.  I don't have a regular income any longer, but I do have the luxury (now) of devoting much of my own time to becoming self sufficient.  In other words, I'll be managing my own time, and I plan to use it to save as much money as I can.  In 2012, when my husband and I were both working full time, he bought his lunch every day, five times a week.  These amounts varied from around $6 to around $20 depending on where he ate.  Since I have time now to see to these things, this year I will be sending his lunch with him to work.  Thanks to the wonders of internet banking, I can go back and track how much he spent in the corresponding week of 2012, then tally up the total cost of the lunches I send with him in 2013.  I should arrive at a weekly total, which I plan to track in this section.  I have other money-saving projects in mind, which I plan to implement over the year, and when the savings from those things come in I will record those totals as well so that by the end of the year I will have a lump sum amount of the total money I have funneled back down into my family's pockets.  In other words, it will be the amount of money I've taken off the up escalator of the capitalist system. 
So.  In his first week back to work in Jan. 2012, my husband spent $24.77 on restaurant lunches, and he only worked three days.  This year, he's only working two days this week, so stay tuned next week for the total dollar value we've saved by my sending his lunches from home.

The Garden Patch

In this series of posts, I will chronicle my attempts to convert a stretch of decorative landscaping into a kitchen garden.  At my home in South Western Ontario, there was over a hundred feet of flower beds already planted with flowering shrubs when we moved in.  For the purposes of this experiment, I plan to pull the shrubs out of one stretch of it and turn it into a vegetable-and-fruit-bearing garden. 
The vegetables my family most commonly purchases at grocery stores are carrots, lettuce, onions, celery, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, green beens, asparagus, and corn.  I plan to plant seeds for some of these vegetables in my newly converted flower bed.  I then plan to weigh the amount of produce I am able to harvest and price the comparable weight at the grocery store.  I intend to come up with a dollar value to every vegetable I grow and keep a running tally of the total savings to my grocery bill.

I will do the same with fruit.  In the past year, I have planted three blueberry bushes, two blackberry bushes, two everbearing strawberry plants, and by some stroke of luck, four wild brambles sprang up in my garden that I hope might be wild raspberry. (If they turn out not to be I'm going to have a bitch of a time getting them out.)  I also planted two cherry trees, two peach trees, and a pear tree.
The photo shows the area of flower bed I'm working on converting.  As you can see, the second shrub hasn't come out yet, but I'm not giving up.  Once I get that one out, I plan to compost directly in those holes over  the winter and then work up the soil in the spring to plant my garden.

Sandwiches All The Way

During the entire five years of our marriage to date, when I was working rotating shifts at an auto plant six days per week, I used to bring my lunch every day instead of buying it.  My husband, on the other hand, bought his lunch at restaurant every day.  Even though some days the only thing he purchased was coffee, other days he went out for entire meals complete with pitchers of draught beer. 
Now that I am out of work, in order to save money, I am going to make his lunch and send it along with him to work.  Over the course of the year, I propose to document the cost of the food items that I will prepare at home and send with him.  Then, thanks to the magic of modern-day online banking, I will go back to the corresponding month in last year's debit records and total his lunchtime expenditures. 

My theory is that once I deduct the cost of his home-prepared lunches from the total of last year's purchased lunches, I should be left with a means of tracking our family's savings over the course of a year.  I plan to post a running tally of the actual dollar amount, updated on a weekly basis, of money that our family has withheld from fast food corporations.  In other words, instead of the money funneling upwards to the capitalist powers that be, it will funnel downwards into my family's coffers.