Author Archives: Acadia Manley

I Hope its Not Just a Pack of Pills

Every three weeks I throw an empty pack of birth control pills in the trash. From this an archaeologist would probably assume a few things right away: that I am sexual active and probably straight. Neither of these things are true but because they are the main purposes of this refuse, they are easy assumptions to make. The fact that these pills only have three weeks instead of four might drive them into more accurate information. It would be interesting to see if there have been any strides made in afab reproductive health, to see if maybe upon further inspection they would know exactly why I take them and think how primitive our science is and there is something 1000 that is much more affective than disrupting natural bodily function. In that case they would be able to tell that in this post roe era there is very little being done to protect women and afab bodies. I hope they would think it is foolish how we treat half a species as disposable. Even if I don’t use birth control for its intended purpose, I think they would know that as afab bodies it is easier to guess because the actual diagnosis process is extremely invasive because no one is doing the research to find an easier and less invasive way of doing it. I hope they know that I throw the pack away while there is a sign outside my dorm telling people not to let doctors gaslight them into thinking there isn’t a problem. I hope that when they see three empty line of pills that there was a problem and I hope they have fixed it by then.

Yarn Re-spun

I use a lot of yarn and other fibers. It would be really interesting to see the acrylic yarn I use turned into new yarn or stuffing for other projects I work on. It wouldn’t take much to make this work because yarn can be broken down and turned into new fiber pretty easily. It would require fiber artists to send their scraps back to yarn companies which would require all the colors to be mixed up. Though they would need to be separated by type because specialty yarns probably couldn’t be recycled in the same manor. With normal acrylic fiber it would just take the separation of those fibers, possibly the bleaching and dying, the washing, and then re–spinning to turn them into new yarn.   

A walk in the woods

When you are walking through the woods and then all of a sudden you see a soda bottle or a beer can. This disrupts the idea that the woods or nature are somehow a place untouched by man, which can be a very violent idea when you realize the separation that provides. Humans thinking that we are separate from nature allows us to see ourselves as above it, a governing force that can choose to protect or destroy but that is false. People are just as much a part of nature as ever bug and fern no matter how hard we try to distance ourselves. When we see a piece of trash in a seemingly natural space it forces us to confront this idea. This idea of separation isn’t only a human idea it is a colonial one. Native and indigenous people all over the Earth have known that we are all as much a part of nature as everything else. Nature is not above us and we are not above nature. This idea of utopian forests that are untouched by people allows us to ignore the fact that people and nature are equals who have been interacting for thousands of years.  

Water Pollution

In Abington Massachusetts and almost every other place on planet Earth drinking water is a very regular activity. The ignorance of pollution within water is a privilege that most people don’t understand they have. The idea that you must accept that the simple act of drinking water is inherently polluted. The US government has limits to how much pollution is allowed in drinking water but that means that there is still pollutants in our drinking water. In my town we have received several notices of unsafe drinking water over the last few years as limits of PFAS change in Mass. Our drinking water is just over the limit of pollution but the reason we got notices recently isn’t because the levels have risen in the last few years but because the limits have changed. Why is the water not okay now when it was the day before they sent the notice? Why is any amount of pollution a safe amount of pollution? If we decided one day that any pollution is unacceptable then there is no viable drinking water in my area until they install new filters and improve our water treatment facility. For a while we would need to use bottled water which requires more pollution to be produced. Until then I will be drinking water with PFAS in it and waiting for us to figure our shit out. 

https://abingtonnews.org/2023/10/11/ahs-ap-bio-class-tests-for-pfas-in-abington-streams-ponds/ 

The Handmaid’s Magazine

I do not regularly interact with magazines but I know that many people do and I think it would be an interesting thing to write about. Magazines come out very quickly one after another and there are so many different kinds. They are all meant to be read and then discarded. The magazine industry relies on the fact that people will quickly consume the information within before moving onto the next one. The interesting thing about magazines is that the information is also disposable. I realized this while reading the Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. The narrator is thinking about her life from before and is given a magazine. She says “I read them in dentists’ offices, and sometimes on planes; I’d bought them to take to hotel rooms, a device to fill empty space while I was waiting for Luke. After I’d leafed through them I would throw them away, for they were infinitely discardable, and a day or two later I wouldn’t be able to remember what had been in them” (Handmaid’s Tale, Chapter 25, Margaret Atwood). Not only is the physical thin brightly colored paper disposable but too is the information within. The quizzes, tips and tricks, new styles, and celebrity drama is all disposable too, it may be interesting in the moment even worth a mention to a friend but after only a few days the memory of the magazine will fade and with it all of the information and bright pictures as well. The paper will go from production line to trash can in only a matter of days and the information will drift off to wherever forgotten information ends up and it will be as if the magazine never existed at all. The Handmaid’s Tale on the other hand is completely in-disposable. The book has had an impact on dystopian literature and feminism. It was published in 1985 and is still relevant today, maybe even more so. Not to mention the fact that because of how many times the book has been a part of book banning and book burning the author Margaret Atwood commissioned a flame proof version of the book.

Pumpkin: A Filthy Out of Place Resource

I chose a carved pumpkin post Halloween. When I first think about a decaying pumpkin I think of filth. It is dirty, gooey, smelly, and I probably wouldn’t want to touch it with my bare hands. As we get further and further away from Halloween it also becomes out of place. A pumpkin on your front step or balcony in October is acceptable but a week into November it becomes more and more out of place. But as a person who composts, the pumpkin now becomes a resource because it will help enrich the compost which will help plant more pumpkins next year.  

The idea of the pumpkin being filthy makes the most sense in connection with why it is considered waste. When things seem gross and smelly you are more likely to want to throw them away while the idea of the pumpkin as a resource does the opposite. Because the pumpkin is starting to decompose already it will make great compost.  

 

 

Farming a Waste-less World

The farm is structured around waste in an interesting way because there are real uses for most of the waste it produces. Some of the waste at the farm includes food scraps and animal waste. I think this is interesting because in most places waste is waste but in this case, waste is actually useful. The term waste implies that there are no further uses for the item but in this case the waste never actually becomes waste. The pigs will eat food scraps which eliminates the waste that they would become. The animals produce waste in the form of feces which becomes manure which helps to produce more food. Then the food scraps can be used to feed the animals and the animals produce manure which is used to produce food then the food scraps become food for the animals who produce manure which is used to produce food and on and on it goes. It is the perfect cycle that does not produce any real waste. Of course, I am not positive that this is how things work here on our farm, but it is in theory one of the perfect and natural cycles that help to avoid waste when used.  

Recycling Responsibility

My mother majored in environmental studies in college and made sure to teach me and my brother how to recycle. When it comes to recycling as waste, I would consider that my responsibility. My responsibility to make sure that everything I am recycling is actually recyclable and making sure that I am recycling everything that I can. I also extend that responsibility to my surroundings and the people who surround me. I make it my responsibility that my friends and family also recycle properly and as much as possible. I have even extended this responsibility to my community. My high school doesn’t actually recycle. The bins are all there, they teach us how to do it properly, and that it is the right thing to do and then all the bins get dumped in the trash. For most of my childhood I wasn’t aware of this so my responsibility ended when the correct recycling went in the bin, but when I realized this it started to extend to where the bin went. I tried for years to figure out how to get my school to recycle and I was never able to. I still want to try to solve this problem but when I was in high school the problem felt bigger than me and it didn’t help that all of the adults were telling me there was nothing I could do. It feels like my responsibility is to make sure that all possible recycling gets recycled properly but the problem is just too big for one person.  

After the recycling leaves in the recycling truck it could go to a recycling plant but there aren’t many or it could get shipped over to malasia where it will simply be burned. There is really no way of knowing whether my recycling is going to actually be recycled it is a scary idea. But lets say that it does get recycled. Then the single stream recycling will be run through this super interesting machine with magnets and air jets and all kinds of cool things to separate all of it into its respective types. The small pieces will fall throught at the beginning and then the cans and other metals will be caught by magnets. Then the plastic and paper get separated by a sorting machine that sucks the plastic up. Then the paper and plastics get packaged into bales and sent on to the next stage of recycling. The paper is recycled by adding water and turning it into a pulp. Some glass is broken down into a sand to be used on beaches and during natural disasters. I assume the plastic and aluminum are melted but unfortunatly this is where my knowledge of recycling ends. 

Empty Vessel Filled with a New Purpose

I have been sick for a while, so I have been going through a lot of ibuprofen for my sore throat. After I finished the bottle, I threw it in the trash can in my dorm room. Then I noticed the yarn scraps on my desk and realized that the ibuprofen bottle is the perfect size to store small scraps of yarn. I grabbed the bottle from my trash. I wasn’t very worried about retrieving it because I knew everything that was in there already. Generally, when something has served its purpose, it is trash, it no longer has a use unless you give it one. For this bottle its main purpose was to hold medicine, when the medicine was gone it became an empty vessel until I decided to fill it with yarn scraps and then it had a purpose again. Things are only trash when you can’t imagine any more uses for them. That is why the three Rs are so important: before something becomes trash it should be reduced, reused, and then recycled, that way it continues to serve a purpose even after the original one is complete.

The Hoarding Tendencies of a Small Business Owner

I have a significant amount of a lot of items including graphic t-shirts and bags but neither of those compare to the amount of yarn that I have. There is yarn in a plastic tub, a basket, one of my desk drawers, in random bags and on my desk. There is probably yarn on me somewhere right now. There are also many completed crochet items around my room and that doesn’t even touch on my room back home which has an entire corner dedicated to it and even more finished things downstairs. This could be seen as hoarding, especially if I was a hobby crocheter, people always joke about a yarn addiction, but my yarn is technically materials for my small business and the completed items are my stock. When it all comes out of a tiny dorm room it can really seem like a problem and it probably still is at least a little bit but I am able to explain most of my hoarding fears away by reminding myself that the yarn provides a portion of my income. Where the actual problem comes in is when I keep buying yarn that I don’t actually need, which is a problem I am currently working through by refusing to buy yarn unless completely necessary. 

 

Yarn from reddit