In an exasperated post on his PR Junkie blog, Mark Ragan says that despite his own lifelong support of environmental causes, he’s had his landfill of contradictory demands about how to be a greener fellow.

I think we adults are starting to remember what it feels like to be kids:

Lots of different grownups  telling you lots of different things: You can fart (and say "fart") at home, but not at school. You can’t wipe your nose on anybody’s shirt but Dad’s. You can jump in the puddle in your purple sandals but not in your pink ones. You can stay up late when lots of people are over and Mom and Dad are distracted, but you have go to bed right on time on Wednesdays. And not another word out of you!

You ask why, the answers don’t add up, but who are you to complain, you’re just a kid.

Isn’t that about how we all feel about this environmental stuff?

And from the sounds of Mark’s rant (and its likely resonance with readers) we’re all about to hit adolescence.

In college my roommates and I used to recklessly throw a ball—or a beer bottle or a shoe—around the living room of the tumbledown house we lived in. The game wasn’t over until something in the room was destroyed. Hence the name of the game, "The Play Until Something Gets Destroyed Game."

I was reminded of those nihilistic days as I watched MSNBC take us in three days from being shocked and sorrowful (and a little shocked at just how sorrowful) to muffling our own guilty grumbles: Okay, enough about a TV news guy, however warm, smart and decent.

TV media just doesn’t know a story is over until its subject, living or dead, has been destroyed, along with our good feelings.

Dylan Thomas is said to have once interrupted himself, in his cups and pontificating, by saying, "Someone’s boring me. I think it’s me."

I just returned from a wet weekend in Sacramento, Calif., where my sister-in-law lives. Her friends and family gathered less to celebrate and more to marvel that she somehow found time and reason to work so hard to add to a life that’s already so rich.

Anyway: During the weekend, which involved meeting a wonderful variety of California women—feminist activists, WPFL football players, scholars and wits—and I heard myself lecturing, Thomas-like, about writing.

"There are two ways to interest people with writing," I was telling the nose guard on the Sacramento Sirens (she wants me to do a Plimpton "Paper Lion" thing with the team). "You either take a subject they think is foreign and make it sound familiar to them. Or you take a subject they think they know backwards and forwards and write about it in such fresh detail that it comes to seem to them as strange."

"And of course the best stories …" here I paused for a sip of gin and leaned back regally, "achieve both."