A few days ago I took out all the pens I could find around the house and put them on the dining room table so I could sort them: \u201cPens to keep\u201d and \u201cPens to get rid of.\u201d But each of those categories has several subcategories, like Pens I love but need ink refills; Pens for Rigid Plastics at the recycling center; Pens for school children; (…and more. I won\u2019t further bore you.)<\/p>\n
You may think this an occupation for the feeble minded, but I allowed this ridiculous number of pens to enter my home, thereby sentencing myself to this task. At least after I get done with this, I\u2019ll think twice before I pick up more pens.<\/p>\n
The pens are still on and around the dining room table.\u00a0 Lindi has been very patient. I\u2019ve told her two or three times that the pens would be gone by the end of the day. Meanwhile I\u2019ve been clearing a spot among them for us to eat there at mealtimes. Instead of candlelight suppers, we\u2019re having ball-point-pen suppers. Think about that<\/em> if you think junkiness doesn\u2019t affect your quality of life.<\/p>\n Obviously, if I were efficient and didn\u2019t care about pens or the environment, I would scoop them all up and throw them into our curbside garbage. But I can\u2019t do it. I couldn\u2019t live with myself, knowing they\u2019d go straight to the landfill. I\u2019m compelled to see that they get used to their death, and that they go into plastics recycling after that.<\/p>\n It feels like a dubious use of my ever-shrinking time on this earth. But now that I\u2019m realizing that there\u2019s nothing I can do to change who I am, I can at least change what\u2019s left of my future: I will not<\/em> spend my golden years on this drudgery! And the only way to prevent that is to become despotic about preventing further junk accumulation in my home.<\/p>\n Next: a photo of the sorted pen-mountain, as proof of the completed task.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A few days ago I took out all the pens I could find around the house and put them on the dining room table so I could sort them: \u201cPens to keep\u201d and \u201cPens to get rid of.\u201d But each of those categories has several subcategories, like Pens I love but need ink refills; Pens […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[19,74,39,23],"tags":[20,5,43,27,85,86,76,46,26,83],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/roomforapony.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/roomforapony.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/roomforapony.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roomforapony.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roomforapony.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=368"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/roomforapony.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":440,"href":"https:\/\/roomforapony.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368\/revisions\/440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/roomforapony.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roomforapony.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roomforapony.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}