Going Paperless 7 – Junk Mail

It’s been over a year since I started on the paperless path and my life is still full of paper.  I’ve spent this Sunday shredding files with personal information.  When I started this project I was mostly concerned with the tons of magazines I was getting in the mail each month.  Now my mailbox is mostly magazine free, but my paper recycling bucket has plenty of paper in it every week.  After canceling magazines I loved, my mailbox is still full of crap that I never wanted.

Since we bought the house my wife grew up in, we get mail for her dead parents, and after my mom died, I had all her mail forwarded here, and between our five names we get piles of unwanted mail.  Hell, we got a letter the other day for a man who lived in the house before my wife’s folks bought it in 1961.  We also get mail for my wife’s two brothers and several of their children.  And we get mail for two very special people: occupant and resident.

I’ve tried to write some of the regular senders and inform them about the deceased, but many types of mail we get are due to our names being on endless lists.  Lists that are sold from one marketing company to another.  It’s harder to fight junk mail marketing than unsolicited phone calls because there is no official federal do not mail registry, like the National Do Not Call Registry.  (There is a campaign, Do Not Mail, that’s collecting signatures for a petition for the federal government to create a Do Not Mail service like the National Do Not Call Registry.)

The Direct Marketing Association does offer DMAchoice.org.  Of course, these are the people trying to help businesses sell you stuff, but they claim they want to develop good relations between customers and sellers, so you can register for what you don’t want or what you do.  However, many marketing companies do not belong to the DMA.

I have found a number of other web sites with good advice on how to reduce the flow of junk mail:

There are pay services that will do some of this work for you, but I couldn’t find enough information about them to risk hiring them.  All these advice sites require work, and some of the advice requires contacting agencies and giving them your SSN.  I’m still mentally debating that.

I have joined DMAchoice.org but it’s not simple to use like the National Do Not Call Registry, but it is helpful.  DMAchoice divides junk mail into four categories:  Credit Offers, Catalogs, Magazine Offers and Other Mail Offers.  This service helps you to add or remove your address from hundred of member companies mailing lists, or it helps get you onto lists that warns companies not to market to you at all.  But it’s not perfect.  Any company that you buy from, or subscribe to, will continue to send sales offers to you.  For example, I buy from L. L. Bean, and I get catalogs all the time in the mail, and emails about specials.  And my wife would probably get mad at me if I canceled the J. C. Penny’s sale catalogs.  DMAchoice.org expects you to take notes on what you get in the mail and work carefully to thin things out.  Also, DMAchoice.org has a service to stop junk mail to deceased recipients.

I get a lot less mail than I did a year ago.  Because I quit subscribing to magazines, I get far fewer offers in the mail.  I’ve even had a rare day of getting no mail whatsoever, and on many days my red Netflix envelope is the only thing in the box.  I bet my mailman loves me, if he’s not worried about losing his job.  If only I could only convince him not to deliver those weekly bundle of local ads.

Going paperless takes work, a lot of work.  Maybe a year from now I’ll have the junk mail under control.  Not only will that save trees, keep carbon out of the atmosphere, but it will save me time.  I’ve already saved a lot of time by paying bills automatically through bank drafts, so most of the mail I do process now is junk mail.  However, I still get lots of printouts from Blue Cross Blue Shield after each doctor’s visit, and those monthly statements from my banks.  And some companies that I pay by bank draft want to send me their statements anyway, which is a total waste.

My paper recycle bin will always have paper in it because of product packaging, but the amount I put out by the curb gets smaller over time.  In today’s society where most people have a computer, there’s little reason to deal with the printed word.  Email has replaced the letter, and now the web is replacing catalog shopping.  I read far more news stories on the web than I do in magazines and newspapers.  Instead of printing out copies of things I want to save, I just make a .pdf and file it away.  Eventually, I think most of the communications we get in our mailbox can be processed digitally, including any junk mail that we might actually want.

JWH – 3/29/9

Fuel For Writing

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything on Auxiliary Memory.  I’ve started several essays but never finished any.  I also started a diet. I’ve notice over the years that there’s a relationship between calories and the number of words I produce.  Cookies, cokes, cakes and candy fuel my mind for writing.  Dieting leaves my brain lethargic, suitable only for watching TV.  And man have I been watching TV this past two weeks!  I’ve seen 33 episodes of Battlestar Galactica.  I had to boost my Netflix from 1 disc at a time to 3 to keep up with my hunger for more shows, watching up to 4 episodes a night.

The difference between being active and passive is junk food.  But since I’ve ballooned to 237 pounds I can’t keep feeding my creative drive.  And those healthy fruits and vegetables just don’t stoke the fire to crank out words.  I’ve got to find some kind of discipline to get back into writing.  Without sweet calories, I guess I need to learn how to push myself by will-power alone.

Of course, I’ve got to ask myself why write at all?  Not to mention the fact that I’ve been mentally beating myself up for the last couple years for writing on the blog instead of working on fiction.  Blog writing is like practicing the piano.  It’s very good for mental health.  For the last decade I’ve been forgetting more and more words, and even how to pronounce them.  When I started blog writing that boosted my ability to remember.

Getting old has other side affects besides the slowing of brain access speeds.  There is a tendency to solidify thoughts in old age, so if you’re not careful you’ll parrot your frozen opinions whenever a response is needed.  Exploring concepts in a blog helps break down comfortable old opinions into their basic parts so you can start over and remodel the rooms in your brain.

All this new thinking requires energy and time.  My best time to write is mornings, but Monday through Friday I have work, and often on the weekends I have personal obligations.  Writing at night requires lots of extra calories.  The obvious solution is to get up at 4 or 5 in the morning and write before work, but right now I don’t have that kind of discipline.  My body naturally wants to sleep until 6:30 am when the cats start meowing for their breakfast.

There are alternative fuels for writing.  Sometimes playing loud music can stimulate my brain cells.  Other times reading an inspiring article and taking a short nap to digest the thoughts will get me to jump up and start writing.  I’ve never had the mental energy to write like a professional writer, that is to stick to writing like working a 9 to 5.  Real writers can write when they’re not in the mood, or when they lack the energy.  Real writers can’t not write, but I don’t have that demon.

One way or another I’ve got to find the energy to write.  I would be tempted by artificial stimulants, but my old body can’t even handle caffeine anymore.  I know I can’t stop writing because my mind would quickly start sliding downhill again.

JWH – 3/29/9

More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon

When I read More Than Human during my teenage years over forty years ago it was a murky novel too adult for me to understand.  I’ve just finished listening to the Blackstone Audiobooks edition read by Stefan Rudnicki and Harlan Ellison, and at age 57, the story now feels crystal clear.  There’s a reason why More Than Human shares the #1 spot with Dune and The Demolished Man on the Classics of Science Fiction list.  The book is powerful and deeply psychological and reminds me more of Faulker than science fiction.  Theodore Sturgeon wasn’t you typical science fiction writer, he explored inner space rather than outer space.

More Than Human is a fix-up novel comprised of three related novelettes that cover several years of action.  They are “The Fabulous Idiot,” “Baby is Three” and “Morality.”  The novel is about several abnormal kids with paranormal talents that struggle to form a single being which they call homo gestalt.  I don’t want to describe the novel in detail, those can be found through the links I provide, instead I want to analyze the novel for what it says.

Theodore Sturgeon was interested in psychiatry and the inner landscape of the human mind when he wrote this book.  More Than Human came out in 1953 at a time when literature and film were obsessed with psychotherapy.   We had just gotten over a monstrous world war that killed tens of millions of people and left us with technology that could end mankind.  I think a lot of people were afraid of the future.  This is also the time of Joseph McCarthy and his witch hunt for reds, the Korean War, A and H bomb testing, the Rosenberg trial, childhood diseases, birth defects, polio scares, juvenile delinquency and other troubling stories filling the news.

The early 1950s represented a shift in science fiction publishing from the golden age pulps to the higher status of hardback and paperback publication, and Hollywood movie productions, pushing science fiction into the public eye just when everyone was thinking about the end of the world and hoping for a brighter future.  This time also coincided with the rise of many superhero comics, an interesting psychological expression of the times in itself.

From these influences, Sturgeon works to imagine what the next stage of homo sapiens will be like, but he comes up with the most bizarre origin for his new homo gestalt: damaged and rejected children.  Instead of a handsome Übermensch, Sturgeon assembles a group body made up of kids with wild talents and its head from a supercomputer like brain housed in a baby with severe birth defects.  The children’s group mind is tied together with ESP powers.

This is another reflection of the 1950s, when concepts of psi-powers thrilled the public and even overwhelmed the science fiction magazines.  Why was the generation just before the baby boomers so into psychic powers?  I think More Than Human is a very impressive novel, but hugely flawed philosophically.  The desire to be Slans begs for psychoanalysis.  I think all of 1940s and 1950s science fiction that dwelt on this topic culminated in 1961 with the publication of Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein.

Why does every imagined homo superior have psychic powers?  And are not psychic powers the same powers that gods have in myths and religion?  And in many books about Human 2.0 they also predict an indifference to killing members of Human 1.0 species, another god-like power.

Sturgeon leaves us thinking we need homo gestalt to solve the problems of homo sapiens, but the one specific example that occurs in More Than Human of homo gestalt helping a single poor man goes neglected.  I admire this novel for its writing, but I don’t like what it says.  I just don’t believe the next stage of human development involves gaining psychic powers.  Decades of science has shown there is actually zero ESP ability in human beings.  Nor is there any reason to believe we will evolve ESP abilities.  About the closest we’ll ever get to telepathy is the cell-phone and look what people do with that ability.

I think there’s a reason why Slan and More Than Human are not well known novels, and why Stranger in a Strange Land caused a lot of controversy.  I think the average person doesn’t believe in psychic powers and they don’t want to live in a world where those powers exist. 

The TV show Heroes is exploring this topic now, but the writers and producers don’t know how to deal with it topic philosophically.  They understand that the general public would probably want to exterminate those with abilities, but they want to make their Heroes acceptable, but their Heroes are like the crazy Greek gods fighting amongst themselves, seeming capricious and petty.  They save themselves and not humans.

I can’t think of any novel that explores homo superior ever coming up with a believable future in which psychic powers makes things better.  In the over half-century since More Than Human was published we have made the world much better.  Sure, we have mountains of problems, but we don’t have many of the terrible problems we used to have.  And none of these problems were solved with psychic powers.  Supermen can’t stop war, they can only oppress us.  Sturgeon knew this at the end of More Than Human.

JWH – 3/15/9   

The Distance Between Us

There are two ways I measure the distance between people.  The first way, physically, can be measured in inches, feet and miles.  The second way has no standard of measurement, but I like to use an analogy.  If two people are communing in perfect telepathy then they are zero distance apart mentally.  Obviously, we never get as close mentally as we can physically.

I bring up this topic because I’ve notice that the average distance between people as they get older appears to grow.  This isn’t always the case, because some spouses, lovers and friends get much closer as they age.  No, what I’m observing deals with the average relationship between people in general.

When we are little kids we’re very close to our parents and siblings, and then when we start daycare or school, we’re jammed together with gangs of kids own age, which continues through our early twenties when we get jobs and start hanging out with a more diverse age mix.  During the work years, we develop new social bonds at the job site that lasts until we retire, at which time we start over again bonding with other retirees.  Often as we get older, we stay at home more and that increases the distance between other people.

I’m only 57, so I can’t speak for the later decades of life, but I’ve notice a trend in my friends and acquaintances.  Everyone seems to have gotten selfish with their time, including me.  This is understandable, with work and the other demands on life, free time is precious, but it seems like people have gotten even more miserly with their extra time.

I think by my age, the fifties, people have learned exactly what they want to do and we just don’t want to waste time doing something we don’t like.  I see this more and more with friends around me, and by observing groups.

If you go to a rock concert, most of the people are young even though rock has been around since I was four.  People my age have pretty much given up on certain kinds of pursuits.  In fact, I don’t even like hanging out places that are filled with people in their 20s and 30s.  I often find myself at movies attended by folks mostly my own age, films young people would consider boring or depressing. 

You can see this trend in other social groups.  Just observe the mix of young and old.  Some events attract mostly young, some mostly old, and some a mix, but mostly you see a bulge of youth and a trailing off of older people.  Many social situations reflect the age mix found in the reality shows Survivor and The Amazing Race. 

In recent years I’m always the old guy of the group and it makes me feel like the old guys on Survivor.  And if you watch that show, there is a bias by the young players against the older players, which represents a kind of distance.  I’ve heard from other people my age that they feel getting old means moving away from the world of the young. 

But I also think as we get older we withdraw from each other.  Maybe it’s dwindling energy, so we start making conscious decisions we don’t want to waste any of our energy on minor friends.  But it’s more than that.  My wife and I spend an ever growing amount of time apart because we each focus on our favorite hobbies.  For example, my wife loves going out to trivia contents at restaurants, an activity that is dull to me because I can’t remember a damn thing anymore.  I like going to movies that bore her.  So we each have other friends for those preferred activities.

I used to have male friends that I’d go to the movies with.  When I was young this was because I wanted to see action films with lots of violence.  Now I don’t.  Some of my male friends have stopped going to the movies altogether, or others go to kinds of films I just don’t want to waste two hours of my life watching.

I know a number of women over fifty who are without husbands.  Many say they never want to remarry, but some are looking for boyfriends or new husbands.  I know one women who says she only has time for one romantic evening a week, and another who jokes she’s be willing to have one romantic night a quarter.  Other than that boyfriends would be too interfering with their lives.  Of course, I also know women looking for long term relationships with guys who they want to spend all their time with, but they have trouble finding such men.

It appears some of us aging people still want tight bonds and others want a new kind of freedom they didn’t have when they were younger.

All of this discussion so far has mostly dealt with the distance people have at the physical level.  Let’s go back and analyze the mental distance.  When we were little kids we played in gangs that were always touching, punching, pulling, tickling, grabbing, and so on.  And it felt like we were all alike in our play.  Getting older was like being separated from the Garden of Eden.  It became so easy to hurt one another mentally, so we sought out best friends for survival.  High school years for some people were the best times of their lives, but for others it was the worst, and in either case, those years seemed to affect us for the rest of our lives.

Then there are the years of searching for a mate.  Sex brings us as physically close as possible, and we all hope it bonds us mentally as well, but that’s open for question, because for the rest of our lives we wonder what our mates are really thinking.  The close mental distances we achieve are often illusionary and is the foundation of a lot of frustration that comes later in life.

What if we really could commune telepathically.  How many close friends would we find in our lifetime?  Any? Would our spouses grow to hate us for our thoughts they don’t like, or would telepathy create a deeper understanding?  Is there anyone that you’d open your mind to completely?  Is the emotional binding of zero mental distance possible?

I don’t think telepathy is possible, but brutal relentless honesty is, and we don’t have the stomach even for that kind of closeness.  Maybe we grow apart as we get older because we don’t like being that honest.  Could it be that young people are more emotional because of their closeness?

From casual observation on my part, it appears that a growing portion of the population spend much of their later years alone.  Even when we’re bunched together again in assisted living homes and nursing homes, like school and daycare, people often seem lonely.  Big families that stay together to the end are rare.  More people are entering their retirement years as singles rather than couples.  It looks like divorce and small family size will be hard on the baby boomer generation.

Even though I have a wife and many friends I feel like I’m spending ever more time alone.  And for the most part I like it that way.  I’m selfish with my time so I can pursue my hobbies, but I wouldn’t want to be completely alone.  I’m actually looking forward to living in a retirement community or assisted living, because more than ever I’m preferring the company of people my own age, and I wouldn’t mind being segregated from the young.  It’s funny, but in the 1960s we didn’t trust anyone over 30.  Now I have a hard time relating to people under 30, and I’d like them a whole lot better if they were older than 50.  If it much easier to identify with a 75-year-old than a 25-year-old.

And I think those tendencies relate to the mental distances we feel between other people.  It’s funny, but my biology whispers hints I should get zero distance physically with young females, but mentally I know that’s silly.  Even if I was a billionaire and a young women had a reason to overlook my homeliness and get physical, I’m not sure if it would be possible to get close mentally.  I don’t know if my problem with understanding the young is because my wife and I never had kids, or if that’s just part of the aging process.

I think as we get old we also still have some of the desires we had when we were kids.  I’ve seen stories about baby boomers forming leagues to play grade school games like dodge ball, kickball, tetherball and four-square.  I think we still want to play physically together to recapture that illusion we had as kids that we were also mentally together.  I think that’s also why many older couples and singles take up dancing, to recapture those feelings of the high school years.

Another way we’ve found to get close to other people mentally is the Internet.  I have stumbled across blog pages where people write about the same exact things I love to write about.  I’ve often wondered if I could put my 100 favorite movies, books, songs and TV shows into a computer and it could find people that have the same favorite 100 of each, would we be mentally as close as people could get outside of telepathy?

I’m writing this blog post because I’m wondering if I’m sensing a shift in social awareness due to aging and I need to prepare myself for more social changes as I get older.  I’ve always felt that as long as I had a wife, a few friends and the social aspects of work I’m good to go for personal contacts both mentally and physically.  But if I retire, and my friends keep withdrawing into themselves, or my wife and I move to a retirement community, will I have enough social contacts?  And if my wife died or we got divorced, I fear that I could end up being very alone, and that’s scary. 

I understand why men die sooner than women.  Women seem to have a knack for living a long time alone, or at least that’s what my observations show me.  I can think of damn few men I know my age or older that lives alone, but I can tick off quite a list of women.  Not only that, but those women often joke about how glad they are to be free of having to put up with men.  The thought of living alone scares me. 

I don’t feel I’m dependent on my wife.  I do all my own cooking, shopping, cleaning and cloth washing now.  My wife works out of town and is only here six days of the month.  But if I was completely single I don’t think I’d survive my retirement years.  I can’t understand how all those women face decades of living alone.  Does that mean that women can handle a greater average distance between people?

I think there’s a physical and mental distance between other people that’s too far for us to handle.  It’s why people go crazy stranded on desert islands or forced into solitary confinement.  It may relate to why some people go nuts, because even though they might be physically close they can’t achieve any kind of mental closeness.

I used to think that getting old just meant losing my hair and getting wrinkled.  I figured no big deal, I can handle that.  I now realize that aging is a lot more complicated.  For one thing, I realize that physical degeneration makes me want to recede socially.  I didn’t see that one coming.  Now I’m seeing the physical and mental distance factor come into play and wonder where the trend will go.  I didn’t see that one coming either.  In fact, I now wonder how many changes will happen to me that I never imagined? 

I need to study TIME GOES BY: what it’s really like to get older, a favorite blog site I like to read, more carefully.  Ronni Bennett is exploring territory that I will travel in a few years.  I wonder if I can achieve a mental closeness from reading her post so I can understand what she has to say, or is there a barrier of comprehension because I’m not old enough to understand?

There are a growing number of people that are living past 100, and even to 110 and beyond, and I wonder how close to they feel to the rest of us?  How isolating is it to be over 100?  It must take an amazing kind of mental toughness to live that long.  I’m feeling wimpy at 57, so I doubt I have the right stuff for great aging.  Or maybe I need to toughen myself up now if I want to go the distance.

JWH – 3/14/9

Skills for Kens and Barbies

When little girls play with their Barbie and Ken dolls and have the couple drive around in their sports car, if they get a flat, which doll do the little girls expect to fix the tire?  This week was Barbie’s 50th birthday.  It was also the week I ran across “Should you be reading that magazine?” which is about an article in Popular Mechanics, “100 Skills Every Man Should Know.”  By the authority of Popular Mechanics, Ken should be the doll that knows how to change a tire.  The editors believe Barbie should acquire  her life  skills by reading their sister magazine, Good Housekeeping, but I bet Barbie studies Cosmo.

During the same week President Obama created the new White House Council on Women and Girls.  The council is charged with making sure each federal agency works to improve the economic status of women, develop policies that establish a balance between work and family, prevent violence against women, build healthy families and promote women’s health care.  It doesn’t sound like the White House is trying to rekindle feminism, but rather make paternal laws to protect women.

This week President Obama also made moves to change the Bush’s policies that were anti-science by signing a memorandum “directing the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to government decision making.”  Obama wants to make vast changes in education, including a renewed emphasis on science and mathematics.

Now all of these diverse topics might sound unconnected, but I see a thread.  Fifty years ago Barbie caused a controversy because parents wanted their little girls to play with dolls that looked like little babies, expecting their daughters to grow up to be mothers.  Little girls wanted to play with Barbie because they wanted to grow up to be big girls like Barbie.  They wanted long legs, a nice rack and lots of fashionable clothes, and of course a boyfriend that can change a tire on her sports car.  Was there ever Nobel Prize winning Barbie, or even aerospace engineer Barbie?  There was an astronaut Barbie, but I get the feeling little girls didn’t imagine her being a shuttle payload specialist, but instead just pictured her as a cute space girl like Barbarella.

If President Obama wants to empower little girls, should he encourage them to play with Hilary Clinton dolls?  Should his White House Commission come down hard on the editors of Popular Mechanics?  Should girls take shop class with the boys in school?  When I took shop in the 8th and 9th grade there were no girls in our class.  And us boys never saw the inside of a home economics class.  Is that still true today?

According to Natalie Angier’s The Canon we’re having a damn hard time getting boys or girls to stick with math and science.  Understanding science means understanding reality.  Science can explain why little girls play with Barbies and why the writers and readers of Popular Mechanics expect men to know their 100 specialized skills while women should study Good Housekeeping for important skills that all females should know.

If girls and women must fulfill their biological programming as well as the meet the biological expectations of men, while following guidelines for living set down by ancient patriarchal religions will they ever be free?  And fifty years ago, did Barbie reveal a shift in girl’s behavior?  Was Barbie a step forward in feminism?  Barbie throws off the burka of playing the mommy role to play the part of the hot babe, which is astoundingly documented in the history of the cinema and television since then.

President Obama campaigned on the promise of change, but our society is changing all the time.  The question is how much can we change.  Are there limits?  Will there one day be a new fad doll on the market that little girls take to like Barbie?  A doll that reflects a new generation of women?  Are the sexy outfits Western women wear the burkas imposed on them the males of our society, or do they reflect what women actually want to wear?  (In other words, does Barbie reveal that girls want to grow up to be the Sex in the City girls?)  Does the political shift in the White House towards women represent a new deal for women?  Is it a liberal step forward or does it merely add more protection and care of females?  Is that the role women want?  The majority of women pulled up on the reigns on feminism well before Bush.

Now that Obama is in the White House we can go back and pick up where liberal progress left off, but will we?  If you analyze the undercurrent of change, we only want progress in certain areas and not others.  Even in liberal times there are conservative genes in us that never get turned off.

JWH – 3/13/9 (revised 3/18/9)