from the desk of stinkpot

1) [you grow codgety]

“they’re gonna be sooo sorry!”

thus warned christina after one of our many pieces of junk mail dealt her a nasty papercut yesterday. something snapped in the poor girl, because she decided to take up an old pastime of mine: taking all of those return envelopes in the junk mail, stuffing them with other shredded junk mail, and sending the lot of it back to their senders. this, of course, sticks it to the man: the sender is forced to pay postage for not only their original piece of junk mail, but to ship shredded mail back to themselves. ::gleefully rubs palms together:: in fact, it probably costs those mass mailing fiends a little bit more, since it diverts time from the message handlers assigned to process those accursed credit card pre-approval forms.

clearly, christina and i have a little too much time on our hands. nevertheless, it’s nice to fool yourself into thinking that you’ve got a modicum of control over the daily bombardment of junk mail and spam.

actually, we even noticed that some of these return envelopes have little bar codes on them. i give those envelopes special attention: my hope is that right before the mail handler at Bank of America Processing mutters an obscenity and tosses our letter in the trash, he/she scans the bar code and takes us off of the universal junk mailing list.

really though, i encourage anyone reading this to go off and try sending some trash back to those junk mailers. if, for every 1 person that responds sincerely to the junk mail, 9 or 10 send in garbage, the signal-to-noise ratio would be so low that perhaps mass mailers would reconsider their approach. think of all the trees that would be saved!

if that’s not enough to draw you into our lunacy, at least do it for the cathartic pleasure. i mean, just take a look at how much fun christina was having:

[the above photo was snapped with a 35 mm f/2 lens i just picked up for my slr. the thing produces the most wonderful night photos and close-up portraits]:

on to reason 2) as to how you know you’re getting old:

[you get really excited about kitchen appliances]:

that’s me with our brand new portable dishwasher, freshly harvested off of craigslist. i’m completely in love with Squirty (our dishwasher’s nom de guerre). up until about a week ago, i had no idea miracles like squirty even existed; it turns out, these dishwashers sit on casters and can be rolled to the sink, where you simply connect their water intake to your sink’s faucet. as the cutouts in the guinness commercials say, “how clever!”

we’d been living without a dishwasher, in our otherwise nearly perfect apartment, for the past 11 months. each night, i usually do the dishes while christina cooks – it costs me an hour of work, and the nightly enjoyment of “dishpan hands.”

well now, thanks to squirty, my dry and scaly hands will be no more!

ssssh, though – we haven’t said anything yet about squirty to our landlords. we also haven’t mentioned anything yet about the 29 gallon fish tank sitting in our study. our landlords are very particular about water usage and we burned the remains of our meager supply of political capital last month, negotiating a decrease in our rent. (they were none-too-pleased that i took the liberty of caulking their window frames.) oh well. vive le squirty!

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