Seeking a Cure for the Household with a Junk Mail Addiction
Like humans who eat too much, my house ingests more material than
it needs to survive. It wasn't always like this. I used to bring
in the newspaper in the morning and the mail in the evening. Now
when I come home from the office I find the message light blinking
and faxes spilled onto the floor, flyers slipped under the door,
and an e-mail inbox filled to bursting. The information seeps in
through every orifice. Alas, my house has become an orifice building.
Every day I bring the stuff in, and every week I put it out in the
recycling cans. Binge and purge.
Some of the material that lies curbside has been digested-the daily
newspaper, bills, letters from friends. Most hoever (the credit
card applications and mountains of catalogs) are empty calories.
They land in the recycling bin, having passed through unread and
undigested like corn kernals. Garbage in, garbage out. And once
recycled, they reappear in other forms. This month's Car and Driver
was probably last month's Guns and Ammo. Garbage out, garbage in.
Like the American diet, my mail has decreased in nutritional value,
but the portions are bigger. I discovered that nobody sends letters
anymore, they send newsletters. Unable to decide what information
to send me, they send everything. "All the news that fits..we
print." My phone bill used to be three pages long, consisting
of the monthly charges, the calls made, and a grand total. My latest
bill was 15 pages long and included a statistical analysis of my
phone calls sorted by regions, duration, and social significance.
Out it goes on trash day-binge and purge. But despite the weekly
purge, some items are invariable left behind, and after a few months
my bookshelves are bloated and my closets clogged. Junk mail is
to shelf space as French fries are to arteries.
I was hoping to put my house on an electronic diet; the more I
put on the computer the less I'd put on the shelves. Not so. I print
out jokes, job listings, and recipes from the Internet. Now I've
got the same useless information in two places. And just as anorexia
and bulimia tax the human heart muscle, I fear that information
overload is putting a strain on my PC, which has become the virtual
heart of our household. It's taking longer and longer to boot, and
our two-gigabyte hard drive has become so densely packed that one
day I'm afraid it might implode under its own weight like a galactic
black hole.
If my house has an eating disorder, then I'm the enabler. I let
the clerk at the health food store slip free magazines into my shopping
bag. I respond to unsolicited plea letters in the mail, guaranteed
my inscription in some master database of bleeding hear causes.
I order an item from a catalog knowing full well that in six months
they'll be delivering my mail with a forklift.
I admit that I'm a hopeless junk-a-holic, and I submit myself to
a higher power. I'm convinced that inside my three-story colonial,
there's a two-bedroom ranch house dying to get out. Where's the
12-step program for hefty houses and the women who love them? If
your house is like mine and you'd like to start a support group,
write, fax, or email me. On second though, make that a phone call.
Natalie Zellat Dyen
nat.dyen@verizon.net
  
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