Ideally, treated water should only be used for cooking, drinking, bathing, and cleaning clothes and dishes. Water from showers, sinks, and washing machines — usually called graywater — can be used to flush toilets or for landscaping.

"Eco Bath" sink/toilet water reuse design

The hippie, yuppie, and hipster personas are still alive and well in the world today. I have passed through Hemp Fest and seen the hippies; I have had dinner with a large group of Gen-X yuppies; I have passed by hipsters on the street. I have made fun of each of those groups once they were out of earshot. But especially the Gen-X yuppies.

So maybe it’s a generational thing. Maybe the Gen-X yuppie and the Gen-Y yuppie are very different creatures. (And not just because the Gen-Xers have moved to the suburbs.) I mean, sure, both groups are young urban professionals with “a high-paying job and an affluent lifestyle” (thanks, Urban Dictionary). But while both groups might have large HD TVs, high-tech cellphones, and a DVR/TiVo, the Gen-X yuppie could easily mistake the Gen-Y yuppie for a poor college kid while passing him in the street. (Yay for jobs where the dress code is “wear some”. I wish I was a software developer so I could wear jeans to work everyday too.)

So if I only acquiesce to being called a yuppie if I’m allowed to sprinkle a bit of hippie philosophy (anti-war vegetarian environmentalist) and hipster non-conformity (this is the part where you doubt my non-conformity, right?), then what am I? Luckily someone has come up with a term for this (and trademarked it too…how very yuppie of them) — the “scuppie” (socially conscious upwardly-mobile person). I love to eat organic fair-trade Theo chocolate, then reuse the pretty wrapper as a bookmark in my book on green building. I jet off to Europe twice a year, but first I buy carbon offsets for the flight. But I think the best example of me putting my money where my mouth is is literal…I bank at a credit union and a bank with a social/environmental mission, where I watch my pretty money earn pretty interest, like a good little socially conscious yuppie.

¹Actually, my boyfriend claims I cannot be a yuppie while I continue to be unemployed, but I think this is only relevant if I were willfully unemployed.

The great intarwebs did not answer those questions for me (yet). But I did come across an interesting article and blog post. The first half of the article had me questioning whether I am even mostly introverted. So I starting thinking about it: I like people…some of them…sometimes. I hate going days without seeing other people…unless these people are vapid and annoying. I like having conversations offline…but I hate pointless small-talk (that’s a redundant phrase, mind you). I like meeting new people…but I often have a poor first impression of them until I get to know them better. I enjoy certain social gatherings…but someone probably had to drag me there (if I even made it out of the house). So I’m starting to get the impression that, socially, I am my own worst enemy.

So here’s the current big news: I’m unemployed and going to on a trip to Paris (and Provence, and Bucharest). I decided not to keep my life on hold just because I don’t have a job. I won’t go into the financial details of it (though you can ask me about them), but rest assured I’m not going into debt for this trip.

And best of all, I’ve found ways to turn this trip into a civil engineering “field trip”. Namely, I will be going on the Paris Sewer Tour (Les Egouts de Paris) — the world’s first and longest underground sewer system. I will also be going to the Pont du Gard Roman aqueduct, followed by its termination point and distribution center in Nimes.

Is the advice still applicable? Are employers lying, waiting to see who is brave enough to call their bluff? I don’t know what the average or specific HR person actually wants me to do, but if most companies plainly state something to the effect of “don’t call us, we’ll call you”, then no, I’m not going to bug them. I’d rather someone thought of me as less persistent than another applicant rather than more annoying or desperate.

I don’t deny that enthusiasm for a position varies both between applicants and positions and that employers prefer enthusiastic candidates, but I think if an employer wants to gauge my level of interest s/he should find that out during an interview with me.

The AP shows how maximum weekly unemployment payments vary by state. The lowest is Mississippi with $210 (unless you count Puerto Rico with $133) and the highest is Massachusetts with $900. I feel the need to state the obvious: holy crap, that is a huge difference!

“Embalming became popular in the United States during the Civil War and is still a significant source of groundwater pollution today. Arsenic gave way to the less toxic formaldehyde as the favored embalming solution around the turn of the last century. However, formaldehyde poisoning can still be fatal and it is classified as a human carcinogen by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Some estimates say that one million gallons of formaldehyde are buried in embalmed bodies each year in the United States. Almost all of this will eventually make its way into our water supplies. Efforts are underway to gradually replace formaldehyde with glutaraldehyde, which is considered less toxic.

“Cremation causes nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, heavy metals and particulates to be released into the atmosphere when a body is cremated. If a body has mercury-amalgam fillings, the mercury will almost certainly become air pollution unless the fillings are removed first. Burning a body inside a coffin also creates significantly more pollution than burning the body by itself. Modern crematoriums often have ‘clean smokestacks’ that ameliorate the associated emissions, at least to some degree, and the cremation industry has claimed that reports of pollution have been greatly exaggerated.”

1. Apply to work as a part-time intern, possibly unpaid. Right now I have one place in mind, a self-employed sustainability consultant in Portland.
2. Take some online courses, especially in LEED.
3. On the non-career front, sell more stuff on ebay/Amazon, donate that pile of clothes to an organization for homeless women, and catch up on a lot of reading for personal enjoyment. I own a lot of books I have never read.

I searched fairly thoroughly and did not find a useful tool. But I did find that Fidelity has a pretty good tool to narrow down funds by several useful attributes: the Fund Evaluator.

What it does not do is narrow down funds based on whether they are eco- or socially-friendly (there are other sites for that though) nor can you exclude certain companies a fund might be invested in (Wal-Mart, ExxonMobil, petroleum companies, ahem). But the latter you can do yourself (though tedious) since all funds list at least the top 10 companies they invest in. I like to use Google Finance for getting the bare-bones details of a fund. It’s clean, spartan, and adequately organized.

So anyway, I wanted the whole of the funds I find to be “balanced”, “diversified”, something like that. I’m no investing guru (it’s one of my least favorite topics in personal finance), but I figured I’d start with some domestic funds, sprinkle on a few international ones, and then spread all those out over the 9 different categories (aka the Tic Tac Toe board) — large-cap, mid-cap, small-cap; value, blend, growth. And then I made a chart. As you can see, I didn’t have the same luck finding the same number of funds for each category. But, close enough.

What I really want is some piece of software (or better yet, and online application) that would function like my chart and its categories, plus have the added functionality of being able to exclude certain companies and also query out, say, the minimum investment for each fund for my IRAs. Then you could sort by any attribute and also have an index of all the funds you chose, even though they’re spread out over (almost) 9 categories.

On the job hunting front things are a bit depressing. I don’t know which is worse: possibly having (as opposed to wanting) to relocate to get a job or not getting a job or getting a job you probably won’t like. I found a sustainably-minded company, but “we’re not accepting resumes at this time”. Of course you’re not. And why can’t you accept it and file it away for when the economy bounces back? I didn’t ask that. Snark doesn’t seem appropriate for a job hunt.

Desperate times call for…creativity. Changing gears. Being proactive. And perhaps some sort of yummy dessert?