Yes, I brushed with powder today. Photo proof below. (Warning: Nobody looks pretty at 5 AM, with or without tooth powder in mouth).

Then I slunk into my jogging clothes and proceeded to Agara Lake. Now for those who are unaware of this lake….remember pinching your nose when passing the gutter beside Jakkasandra? That gutter was Agara Lake, one of the few natural lakes in my adopted hometown of Bangalore. It is a hallmark of citizen activism (the kind I strictly stay away from and prefer appreciating from afar…I am cleaning no frothy polluted lake, even if my boss wants me to, which he sometime does: CSR!). Had the citizens not intervened, today Agara Lake would be one of those noisy amusement parks, the kind filled with un-amusing garbage&noise-making crowds.

The fact that I am jogging in this park appreciating the floating islands that naturally clean the Agara lake makes me feel immensely environmentally aware…as if I was there…protesting in 2006 against the amusement park…later…as if I was cleaning the lake…and writing petitions to the government. Whew!! I tell you people….this environment awareness feels good.

One photograph for the masses people…..

Wait. Did you realize something? I have my menstrual cup on! I could so turn this into a jogging with my menstrual cup moment! With just a single photograph, I was not only being environmentally aware, but also a female liberation-ist (a word I made up because I am a writer and that’s what we do).

Later in the shower, I had to perform the extraction. YouTube tells me that I shouldn’t do what I did yesterday…that is PANIC. I must relax or else my vagina walls would compress itself around the tampon and throttle it as if it were a dick. However, it will not disappear inside me as everyone seems to fear.

I decide to do it (tee hee!) in the warm shower, and try two positions….POSITION A: one leg on toilet seat, and POSITION B: Basic squat. Poshish B does the magic in under 5 minutes…mostly spent pretending to shit through the vag….and whoosh/plop…there is blood on the dance floor (yes, I occasionally shake a leg in the shower, you pedant). The unfortunate part is that I could not hold up a holy grail filled with wine-red blood and pose as a sexy-hot vampire.

On a more serious note (that’s the kind of phrase an environmentalist should be using), I had a talk with the Mom, who is totally onboard with this plastic-free in 100 days thingy I have gotten myself into. And honestly, 80% of the sacrifices have to be made by her anyway, and I can simply take the credit on the blog. Easy peasy. (It kind of helps that she thinks plastic is unhealthy and possibly evil.)

Problem areas that came to her contemplative mind….

1. Food grains that come in plastic covers – Even though there are places that give out loose grain, the final packing seems to be plastic.
2. Meat and Fish are wrapped in layers of plastic and paper.
3. Shampoo bottles
4. Online food delivery that I thrive on when mom isn’t around.

Instead of solving any of the above problems and many more, I passed on instructions to her, and decided it was time to celebrate my accomplishments. The following are plastic-free from Day 1:

1. Dishwashing Bar
2. Laundry Powder
3. Tooth paste to tooth powder in bathroom one.
4. No liners in waste bins
5. Waste segregation
6. Pads, Tampons to Menstrual cups.

More on these later. See Ya.