The Conical Glass: The second day of X-Mess

Friday, December 22, 2006

The second day of X-Mess

When I was a wee lass visiting my (American) grandma, she would always retire in the evening to read her papers. A budding smart-ass, I joked that if one were to burrow down far enough in the pile of newspapers by her bed, one would unearth headlines such as "Dewey Defeats Truman" and "Lincoln Shot in Ford's Theater."

A few days ago, I was preparing a box of Christmas presents to send to my parents. I folded up a newspaper clipping to enclose in their card. Joe indicated another clipping on the kitchen counter. "What about that one?"

"That's a page of letters to the editor about an article I'm going to send them. I can't send that first."

"Where is the article?"

I indicate a foot-high stack of newspapers on the coffee table. "Uh, somewhere in there." Yeah, right underneath the special "Bush Defeats Kerry" election issue. Or was it "Bush Defeats Gore"? "Giants Win the Pennant"?

Ah, newspapers -- so fabulously inefficient in this modern world, and yet so irresistible to someone who spent several years in the biz. I can't bring myself to swap newsprint for pixels.

So yesterday, I vowed to go through all the papers, clip what I wanted to save, and toss the rest. It took a few hours, but finally, around 11 PM, I hauled a bin full of newspapers down to the recycling area, along with some outdated Entertainment Weeklys for good measure ("'Titanic': America's Hottest Movie!" OK, it wasn't quite that bad.)

Lessons learned: From now on, I'm going to make a concerted effort to recycle all the week's newspapers every Saturday night.

posted by 125records @ 12:12 PM

1 Comments:

At 4:52 AM, yellojkt said…

In college I just used to pile the old newspapers behind the door until the stack got high enough to become a fire hazard.