All right, and now I'm just going
to read one short piece called--
if you are reading along, called,
called, called, "Love in the Time of Global Warming," which
must be on page 92, which it is.
And it's relatively short.
All right, and this is what I feel like.
So a lot of people understand this book
to be a book about marriage, and how hard it
is to get a marriage to work.
And then some other people understand this book
to be about sustainability, and how impossible it
is to sort of be consistent in one's attempt to sort of try
to maintain some good existence while the planet seems to be--
that's the word?
Not eating itself, but I think I just
read that about hamburgers, but collapsing in a way
that we can barely wrap our brains around.
But some people, I think, see this
is as what I really hope the book to be,
which is about how you can make connections between things,
and that's why the first essay about sustainability
is about all the animals, and all
the connections between Italo Calvino and Jacques Derrida,
and the sun blowing off the water from the planet.
I feel like the more connections we make-- maybe anyway,
my idealist part of myself suggests
that the closer we can get to each other,
and to the things around us, the less likely
we are to destroy them.
But in this essay, in the heart of the--
well, a third of the way through the book,
it's about what I think is fundamentally
the most difficult thing about living on the planet,
and that's living with another human being.
And the other thing is trying to decide what
to buy at the grocery store.
So this essay is called, "Love in the Time of Global Warming."
"I don't think Erik, that's my husband's name,
and I had the be as one phrase in our marriage vows,
but there are days when it's true.
It's usually in a car driving, Johnny Cash sings,
'If I were carpenter and you were a lady,
would you marry me anyway, would you have my baby?'
And June Carter sings, 'Yes.'
And Erik sings along with her, and I sing with Johnny,
and we are on our way to Home Depot.
Erik is installing baseboards in the hallway.
I told him the molding was fine, but he's right,
the old ones have been kicked and scuffed beyond repair.
It will take him three weeks to paint the trim
using his toxic scuff-preventing paint.
He does it freehand.
He is perfect and precise.
That's why he paints our daughter Zoe's fingernails
instead of me.
But there are days that are not like that.
Days at Sam's Club because we don't
have a Costco in Flagstaff, Arizona,
and the kids need 36 juice boxes to get them
through two weeks of school, and to mom brings the snack events.
'I think we should cancel the membership.
It's the same as Walmart,' I say.
'But we're sticking it to them by buying gas,' Eric says,
'the gas is actually a loss for them.
And I hate Walmart so badly.'
'I like the snacks,' Zoe chimes in and as she asks if she can
have another sample of bacon Tillamook cheese.
And $13 bottles of Joel Gott make it worth it to me.
I won't buy the steaks there, even
though their meat is supposedly the freshest in town.
If I'm going to eat meat, I'm only going to buy the kind from
Flying M Ranch, grass-fed local which is $6.99 a pound
for hamburger, three times what it is at Sam's.
And I mean it, I won't buy it until I
see the steaks and the hamburger on sale,
and I really want to make tacos.
I put the Sam's Club meat in my cart.
I hate being a hypocrite, which just
makes me more of a hypocrite, which just makes me grumpy,
and oversensitive, and a fun shopping partner.
So I'm still complaining as I continue
to pile stuff into the cart.
Erik puts his own addiction into the cart,
a city full of paper towels.
'No way, not those.
We do not need that many paper towels.
Where will we put them?'
I ask.
'I need them to finish painting in the hallway,' he says.
Finish painting the hallway are usually
golden words to convince me to go along with anything he says,
but not this time.
'They're not even recycled,' I say.
Although I protest, we both keep walking toward the checkout.
I have my own card.
He puts them on the conveyor belt.
At first I let him sit there, then I shake my head.
I'm snarky under my breath, and then I get loud and I say,
'no way, we cannot get them.'
I take them off the conveyor belt.
Everyone is looking at us I know I'm embarrassing Erik,
but this is beyond unreasonable.
'Everyone is looking,' he whisper-yells as he puts
the paper towels back on the belt.
'I don't care if they're looking, they're not recycled.'
I leave them alone on the conveyor belt,
but I keep yelling, 'You don't even care?
The planet's going to hell and you
don't care if it's scorched and burned for your kids.
Sorry kids, go get another planet.'
Erik comes back, 'Oh, and your wine bottles are so recycled?'
Oh great, now it's not just drinking the wine that's bad,
it's what the wine comes into.
There's no free drinking in this land.
'That's fine, tell the kids to their faces that you don't care
if they even have any trees left when we die.'
We leave.
I'm still yelling, paper towels purchased, in the cart.
We load the groceries into the car,
handing paper towels and wine to each other, picking up one kid,
putting him in the car, shutting the door for the other.
We can shop with our eyes closed.
We can argue with them closed too.
Erik gets in the driver's seat.
You can go to yourself to Sprout's.
He drives home, climbs out of the car,
takes the kids and the paper towels,
leaves me in the garage.
I've ranted, and raved, and still we
have 900 rolls of paper towels, and $50
worth of non grass-fed meat.
Who wins by yelling about paper towels?
Not me.
Scorched Earth policies, it's the worst thing
he can do to me, maybe go to the store alone on a Saturday
when we're supposed to be together."
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much Nicole.
Now we're going to do Q and A, and if you
don't mind, because we're recording this,
can you repeat the questions?
I will.
Can I hold this one?
You can, but you might want to be closer to it.
Oh, this is the recording microphone.
Yes, all right.
He's like, ouch.
Thank you, I will stand here with this microphone like this.
Be cool, Johnny Cash.
All right, do we have any questions for Nicole?
We'll edit this part out.
That's fine, this is normal behavior.
I got a question.