I lay awake at night as the temperature drops. With each drip of the faucet I feel hours of conservation go down the drain. It’s as if the granola me never happened. I’ve been erased.”
Attending university in Montana, a fellow dorm mate reamed me for leaving the faucet running while shaving. The horror! To my defense, I grew up in Texas and had never heard of concepts such as conservation and recycling. RE-cycling sounded like some old fogies’ biker club.
But the habit was easy enough to develop. I had learned how to turn the water on by my freshman year, how much harder could it be to turn it on and off a couple dozen times in quick succession while rinsing my razor? I even experimented (hey, it was college) with dipping my razor in standing water to test whether it used less water. (It turns out the water seeps around the drain plug.) Hell, I’ve become a “yellow, let it mellow” guy in the years since college (and not just in public restrooms).