I get a kick out of throwing things away. (And don’t tell me the landfills are almost full. They aren’t, we’ve got tons of space, and trash compaction methods are getting better, blah blah. In the future it will make more economic sense to reuse more stuff. Then we will.) When the stuff is actually removed from my property I imagine the land rebounding like after the glaciers melted away from the Midwest. Some areas are still rising at rates up to ~1 cm per year. That doesn’t really happen here, on a scale as small as one house. But less junk means less to worry about, store, clean, and pack next time I move. Somehow I’ve accumulated about five containers of hand soap. Gradually I’m using them up, beginning with the emptiest one first. When gone I get to toss the container and remove those 75 grams from my life. Constant readers of Encounters with Stupidity will remember one of the first entries, where I discussed the dissolution of a tenacious bar of soap. Now I’m working on the replacement of that bar, a scented bar I bought in Cyprus. Behind it are a still-wrapped bar of Lava soap (79 cents at Fry’s, I couldn’t resist) and a lovely Chamomile-scented bar from Body Works that I got from Erik and Sara as a thank-you for watching their dogs. I fret that I won’t be able to use up both bars and the five hand soap bottles before I move on next year, but I'm going at full speed, sometimes washing my hands twice just to use more soap.
How many different substances go into the trash? Every time I toss something, I think about how many compounds it contains. I like to get as many different chemicals as possible into the trash. Right now there are various types of plastic, eight or ten different minerals (from some gravel I had in the cuffs of my pants), plant material, thorns from Sabkha’s fur, fur, various foodstuffs...
On another subject:
Do Americans ever learn to spell? I’ve been browsing around on some online dating sites, and I’m appalled. Not by the pictures – by the writing. If you are going to introduce yourself with a 400-word write-up, don’t you think you’d at least use spell check? Or consult a dictionary? Or go back to third grade and learn to spell? And it’s not tough words like “piece” or “misspelled”. Those give me trouble too. The problem is, I don’t think people ever learn. One of the symptoms of our failed government-run (aka “public”) schools.
# posted by stratovolcano @ 11:45 PM
