Debra Baker

    Whether you're talking about your wallet, the environment, all the people that the product went through to be made, conservation of all the resources in the actual product (I think you get the idea), buying used is pretty much always the better option. Not to mention thrift shopping is just more fun! You feel better ethically about your purchases, and it's more fun to sift through all the weird stuff you find.

    And, because I'm a lover of information: statistics.
   

• Decomposing fabric can release methane into the air, and chemicals such as dies or retardants in to the ground.
• if all of the textile waste we normally generate in a year didn't end up at the landfill, we would be looking at a savings of $375 million dollars in fees alone!
• Cotton growing takes a about a quarter of the pesticides used in the U.s. Pesticides are linked to a lot of different nasty things, including colony collapse disorder, a pandemic in the bee population. In case you didn't know, bees pollinate flowers, and are incredibly crucial to the environment and our food department and entire way of life.
• According to the  U.S. National Labor Committee, workers, manufacturing YOUR clothes halfway across the world in sweatshops that YOU don't have to loo at, can make as little as 12 to 18 cents an hour. 
• The 15% of discarded clothing/fabric that is recycled, prevents about 2.5 billion pounds of waste from going directly to the waste stream. 
• Since clothes from most popular stores are so cheaply made nowadays (forever 21, h&m, such and such), they often end up being unusable by the time they pass through the first user and get to a thrift shop. Only about 1/5th of clothes donations are actually sold. However, they can sell them to textile recycling factories, so don't think that there isn't a use for even your really old clothes! 

     Okay, so managing a blog that's being graded by your teacher is slightly harder than I thought. It's a creative assignment, which I was excited about because I usually consider myself a pretty creative person. But my creativity comes in problem solving....maybe. When I'm giving an assignment, or a problem or a set requirement. I figure out how to change it just enough to make it somewhat original. When I'm given a blank slate though, that's a lot harder. Sure you can do anything you want, but, what do you want to do. There's no requirements to hinder you or keep you from making something perfect, so there's not really an excuse to turn in anything less than perfect. I suppose it all comes back to the fear of being wrong. The more I think about it, and my actions, and thoughts, the more I realise how much the fear of being wrong affects me throughout the day. It would be horrible to live without it though. We'd all be running around acting like five year olds. I suppose the embarrassment wouldn't be there since we wouldn't have fear, but it would still be utter chaos. Though, now that I'm thinking about it, would that utter chaos even be a bad thing? Sure it'd be hilarious, but bad? I don't know.

     Hello, I've made this blog for my high school English class. I'm actually pretty excited for this assignment, I have at least four blogs on tumblr so but it's mostly mindless reblogging. I like the idea of having place for refined thoughts, where I have some actual motivation to be creative. I've always considered myself an independent thinker, and I'm glad to fave a reason to share these thoughts. Hopefully I can provide some insight of the world, and just maybe, it will be something new.

     I have a million different interests, and I'll try to post about a little bit of everything on this blog. It will basically be a refined 'painted' view of the world through my eyes. Hopefully it's not too lame...