paper trail

This morning, in my mail, I received catalogs from the Pottery Barn, J Crew, Staples, and Calumet. I’ve never purchased anything from two of those companies, and haven’t purchased anything from the other two since moving to this new address. How have they tracked me down? I have absolutely no idea.

A bit of online research yields that the average person receives 16.7 pounds of catalog junk mail yearly. Collectively, we Americans receive 2.26 million tons of them, and as they’re tough to recycle, each year an additional 4.75 million cubic yards of landfill space are needed to tuck away those glossy pages of heather and oatmeal pique knit crews, of mahogany-stained plank dining tables and matching chair sets.

In my case, I no longer even leaf through the catalogs before tossing them – were I to make my very first Pottery Barn purchase, I’d either head into a store or shop online. But, month by month, the catalogs regularly roll up none the less.

Earlier this week, the small California tree-hugging voice in the back of my head, the one somehow not squelched by years of Ivy League snottery and New York City faux-sophistication, managed to chime in and convince me I needed to do something about it. So, now, each time I receive a catalog that I know I’ll never read, before tossing it, I call the company’s 800 number and ask to be removed from their mailing list.

16.7 pounds less of catalog trash a year isn’t much. But it’s a start.

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June 1, 2004

what’s coming

After countless stretches of thinking time on planes, trains and automobiles over the past month, I’ve finally articulated to myself what I want this site to be about, the various kinds of content I’m hoping to wedge onto this small space of screen real estate. As a result, the structure of the site will be (yet again) evolving slightly over the next few months; in advance, however, I wanted to give whoever the hell you people reading along are a quick heads up on where things are heading.

First, despite the recent spate of increasingly lengthy posts, I’ll be refocusing on short writing covering the various and sundry stupid things I muse about during the gaps in my day: The connection between Skinner Boxes and dating. Violating subway etiquette. Chapstick.

Next, I’ll also be fleshing out further some of my longer ideas into essays of varying lengths – from weightier pieces I’ve been mentally outlining (“God at the Edge of Science: Do Limit Questions Imply a Higher Power?” and “The Napsterization of Film: Shifting Movie Businesses into the Digital Age”) to fun but too extended to be webloggy content (further installments of The Great Pickup Line Experiment, more friends and family interviews [e.g.]).

I’ll also be expanding out the Salmagundi section – still pointing people towards the things I find interesting in my constant stumbling through the web, but with a bit of space for me to toss in a sentence or two about each.

And, of course, keeping true to the site’s name, the vanity content (my bio, trumpet performance schedule, etc.) will be sticking around.

I’m still puzzling through the best way to make all of that fit on one page, as well as how to balance what little writing time I have between them. But, at least in my current fantasy, that’s where the site’s going. Argue now, before I become increasingly wed to the ideas, or forever hold your peace.

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