When I was 11 I got tired of people mispronouncing my name. For a Chinese person, I have an incredibly pronounceable first name -- I don't see how anyone could possibly think that it should be pronounced in any way other than how it's actually pronounced, but people constantly amaze me with their ignorance of basic English phonetics.

I picked Elizabeth out of a book, because I admired the heroine. Probably if I was going to pick a new name now, I'd give it more thought. Look up meanings and stuff. Apparently Elizabeth is derived from the Hebrew for "God's oath", which just isn't that cool, really. But I think 11-year-old me didn't do too badly; I think Elizabeth suits me very well.

I am sitting here looking at the 20-page-long application for a formal Change of Name in Ontario. After nearly a decade of debating it, I've finally decided to change the first name that nobody knows me by, anyway, to the one that people actually use, and take my current legal name as a middle name instead (because I still quite like it, it's quite pretty in its original language).

I think I may also adopt the Blacksmith's last name. It's a seriously strange change for someone who was once so ardently a feminist (and still is, kind of; much more jadedly), and I still think that expecting women to take their husband's (future husband, whatever) name as a matter of course is pretty silly, but that's not why I'm changing my last name... I'm changing it partly because I have no particular attachment to it, and mostly because I dislike having my ethnicity be so easily discernable to anyone who finds out my name.

What do all think ? Not so long ago I would have thought it was a cowardly thing to do, akin to sabotaging my own heritage. But maybe I have grown old and lost my fighting spirit. The fact is that a name like Mei Zhang just does not, in your typical socially influential circles, inspire quite as much confidence as Jane Smith -- and yes, I recognise that that is fucked up in many ways, but goddammit, I'm tired of being a Mei Zhang.

Yesterday I was physically assaulted by someone for kissing my white boyfriend. That was the second time in less than two weeks that we've been attacked, although the first time was only verbal, each time by people enraged at seeing a white man and an Asian woman walk arm in arm. Why do people hate us, now ? Walking down the street with my first boyfriend, who was Asian, nobody ever batted an eyelash, but somehow it's different now that I've crossed racial boundaries, now I'm an evil Asian succubus intent on destroying the white race.

Sometimes I have to stop and marvel at where I am in the world today and the things that have happened to get me here, everything that's ever happened in my life having been woven into a mesh of actions and consequences that all just happened to end up resulting in me being here right now, sitting on the floor in my living room typing a post for my Livejournal.

Everything is so connected. It just so happened that I was born to intellectual parents at a time when China was in great political turmoil, which resulted, some eight years later, among other things, in my sudden move to a different country on the other side of the world. If, in tenth grade, my high school hadn't had such terrible, outdated software, I wouldn't have dropped Intro to Computer Science in order to take French. Half my life would not exist now. If my mother had been nicer to me, maybe I wouldn't have left my parents' house to live independently. I went to France in third year and the consequences of that are pretty obvious. I dated a Frenchman briefly, and the ensuing drawn out, dramatic break up granted me the emotional clarity to be able to be in the relationship I'm in now -- and, speaking of that break up, it only finally happened because my father was diagnosed with cancer, which taught me that there are more important things in life than a silly overseas love affair.

And those are only the really big, visible things. I'm sitting here wondering what the consequences of my decision this morning not to wash my hair will be. I will have slightly oilier hair today, what's going to result from that ? I also saved about 10 minutes from today, but I'll have to spent 10 minutes on it tomorrow, and who knows how that's going to affect the rest of my life. And in the opposite direction, what made me decide not to wash my hair this morning ? Laziness, having gotten up a little bit later than usual, also the fact that three months ago I made an active decision to wash my hair less, which was itself a consequence of many other things in my life.

Sometimes I wonder about free will, and I can't decide whether it exists or not. If I can't control the things that happen around me, and my reactions to them are a result of my personality, which was determined by the way I was raised and the other things that have shaped me in my life, then what free will do I have at all ?

Today I went from this:



to this:



(LG160, no camera, no music player, no MicroSD card, nothing except for phone and text. There is a browser but it's disabled.)

The iPhone was nifty. I could check my email and play Katamari anywhere. I am happy I don't have to have it anymore.

My dad was telling me about growing up in the Chinese countryside, where the concept of "garbage" didn't exist. Everything was either reused or fed to the pigs. He told me of how, to buy soy sauce, you had to take the empty old soy sauce bottle to the store and have it filled up.

So Toronto's city workers have been on strike for 3 weeks, which means, among other things, no garbage collection for us. The city's been sitting under a haze of its own stinky filth for 3 weeks. Instead of grumbling along with everybody else, we took to interpret this strike as an opportunity to convert to a garbage-free household. Not that we were producing much garbage to begin with -- when two hippies live together, it's generally a stretch to have even one small container each of garbage and recycling in one week.

Garbage-free is a pretty simple concept -- nothing gets brought into the house that can't be reused or turned into something else. But our culture is centered on consuming and then throwing away, and then consuming some more. It's been interesting trying to figure out how to break out of that cycle.

Grains, vegetables, and fruits are fairly easy -- you buy in bulk and bring your own bags and containers. We don't have pigs, but organic waste can get turned into compost, thanks to the simple two-bin system we designed to harness the digestive power of hundreds of worms. The composter also gets rid of things like tissues and small amounts of cardboard.

Harmony Organics sells milk in glass bottles that you bring back to the store for them to reuse -- but what about cream, butter, or cheese ? Back in France I used to buy butter (delicious, salty beurre d'Isigny) in bulk, but they don't seem to have that here. And the cheese shops seem to like giving out silly plastics to wrap their cheese in.

For toiletries, we're making most of our own. Our toothpaste, for example, is in a lidded cup sitting on the bathroom shelf. I haven't thought about what to do when I have to replace my toothbrush yet, though. For things like menstrual products, my years of being a pseudo-hippie have put me way ahead : I haven't used a tampon for my period since I was 18.

A huge part of it is also just buying less. If I want to buy new clothes, I have to figure out what to do with the tags. The paper bit can be composted, but what about the plastic ? Last month, I bought a fan that came in a box, and every single piece was individually wrapped in plastic. We weren't garbage free then, but the packaging from that fan made up about 70% of our garbage that week. Obviously if we want to be entirely garbage-free, then we can't buy anything that has packaging or tags on it.

Some things, I have no solutions for. Like the boxes and blister packs I buy my birth control pills in. I'm not ready to give up 99% effective synthetic hormones just yet, although I probably will pay for an IUD at some point.

We'll see how this goes. We might have to compromise and allow one small bag of garbage a month. It's still a very worthwhile experiment.