ben smash!!

okay two gripes:

1. what's with business hours in pullman during the summer? just in the last four days, three out of the four coffee shops i've been in have closed at least an hour before their posted closing time, including one time where the high-school-aged girl (the only staff working at the time) behind the counter called her boyfriend really obviously on her cell phone, told him she'd meet him in 15 minutes, and then kicked me out because "we're closing early tonight because there aren't that many people here". then i walked to a restaurant two nights ago at 730, which was closed despite saying in huge letters right below the "CLOSED" sign that they were open until 10. then there was the other restaurant i tried to get food at for lunch yesterday that was just closed in the middle of the afternoon and stayed closed the rest of the day and night, despite the fact that it was a tuesday. i mean, i understand that college towns have different amounts (read: much less) of business in the summer and they have to adjust their hours to compensate that. but there's a difference between simply shortening your hours and making that knowledge publicly available and kicking people out two hours early just because you feel like it. i hate to sound like someone's grandpa, but a few of those experiences have honestly made me hesitant about giving those places any more of what's left of my money.

2. i know i was whining about a point similar to this a few months ago, so i apologize if this is a rerun, but what's up with recycling? i was talking to a friend of mine yesterday who lives on campus and recycles pretty much all his garbage in the recycling bins. he told me that on more than one occasion he has seen the guys who run the garbage trucks simply come and throw the recycling into the truck with all the other non-recycleable garbage. i've noticed the same thing myself, both on campus and off. it makes me wonder how much difference people like me taking personal responsibility for cleaning up their act (in an environmental sense) really make. i mean, almost all of the energy- and garbage-saving techniques a normal person can employ go through another, larger intermidiary (recycling, water, electricity, gasoline)...and if those higher-ups aren't expending the same amount of effort to save resources at their end, it seems like a lot of the time the little peoples' efforts get wasted. then there's the fact that i can't recycle a decent amount of my garbage without taking a really convoluted drive across town every few days that i wouldn't otherwise take since i don't really drive anywhere. so...is recycling all that cardboard going to offset the damage i do by driving my car? sure, on a national scale these things are fairly easy to justify, but on a personal scale it's hard to tell if it's worth driving to recycle or if it's worth not running the dishwasher versus having to fill the sink to soak your dishes, etc. the higher levels of the "green" movement aren't transparent enough to make this sort of information readily available often, and the possibility that i might be driving across down, wasting gas and ozone to drop off my cardboard boxes into a container that's just going to end up in the garbage and in a landfill with everything else frankly angers me. people who use environmental protection as a talking point to gather financial or political power are all going to be real surprised when the world stops working some day down the line. but i guess as long as that day's not today, it's okay, right? jesus christ.