It's not easy being green!

I hate the environment.  I've been living in an apartment fitted out exclusively with super eco-friendly, energy saver CFL light bulbs for barely three months and already I've had enough!  If there were a baby seal here right now, I would hold it hostage and threaten violence until someone brought me a 100 watt light bulb.

My complaint is principally aesthetic.  They're so ugly!  Who in their right mind would ever put something that looks like this into a fixture that showed the bulb?  It's as if they drew their inspiration from the lamest balloon artist ever.

Really?  An egg-beater?

Let's see, ceiling fan? octopus? flower?

 

Rectangles?  Did you even try?


What's worse, even when their ugly form is mercifully hidden, these bulbs give hideous light.  There's an overbearingly yellow glow that sucks the richness out of any saturated colors (I have a deep red throw blanket that looks gorgeous in any other light, but which looks like dead flesh in the EnergySaver light).  Or there's an evil-looking "cool" shade that could never be appropriate anywhere outside of an insane asylum.  Honestly, there has to be something wrong when there isn't a single setting on my camera that doesn't try to "fix" the light in my apartment.  Canon wouldn't lie.

What's that?  Do I hear objections?  Oh, I see, you're insisting that there are actually nicely shaped eco-friendly bulbs that give off lovely shades of light.  Well, that brings me to my second complaint, which is economic in nature:  If what you're saying is true and there is actually some version of eco-friendly bulb that isn't completely devoid of redeeming aesthetic qualities, then I should be able to find it on the market (egad, capitalism!).  And by "market" I mean my local Home Depot.  But no!  I spent an hour tonight shuttling between the Home Depots in my neighborhood and found only two versions that would fit the sockets in my apartment:  "soft white" (aka, Death Ray 1) or "cool white" (aka, Death Ray 2).  So, for all practical purposes, as far as I'm concerned, there is no acceptable version of eco-friendly light bulb on the market.

The only glimmer of hope that I could find is that one brand of the Death Ray 1 bulbs was moderately brighter than the other brands.  So now my carrion-colored blanket is slightly better illuminated.  Yay.