At Christmastime, I helped organize a massive donation to our local battered women’s shelter, a food drive for the food bank, and our company donated personal care items to all the nursing homes in the city. Helping deliver a few thousand dollars worth of shampoo and food and an immeasurable amount of relief helped remind me that my life, while boring and fairly ordinary, is extremely comfortable. As a way to remind myself more often (and, of course, to teach Malia what it means to be kind and thoughtful), I’ve decided to make monthly donations of paper goods to the women’s, homeless, and children’s shelters in town–items that each organization tells me they run consistently low on (or out of). Will a few dollars worth of toilet paper change my life? Probably not. Will it help someone else find life more bearable? I can only hope so.
"The greatest book of all time," according to one biased reviewer.
I strenuously urge you all to find a way to be more charitable this year, even if it’s just by refraining from being a jerk a few hours a day. Hopefully, you guys choose to do more than just the bare minimum (insert “pieces of flair” joke) and do something meaningful with your time and available resources. Unless you’re really a jerk, in which case I urge you to stay away from me.
In keeping with the year of giving theme, and somewhat in keeping with the gift of paper theme, as well, I’m giving away three copies of my friend D. B. Grady’s book, Red Planet Noir. It’s the exact opposite of toilet paper–you’ll never want to get rid of it, even after it’s obviously been used. I read it over this weekend* and I have to tell you that, in my completely unbiased opinion, this book kicks ass. In my very biased, my-friend-wrote-the-book opinion, this is the greatest book of all time.
You don’t have to do much to win, either. After all, giving isn’t really about getting, so I can’t ask you for much. First, I want you to click this link. Then, I want you to tell me what you’d give for a free copy. This is hypothetical, of course–if you actually had to give something, you would just buy one, right? It’s kinda like the “what would you do for a Klondike bar?” campaign, only smaller and less catchy, but equally open to crude humor and “your mom” jokes.
Aaaaand, GO!
I read a few days ago that a non-scientific study determined that half of Amazon kindle owners are 50 or older, which leads me to believe that they a) are more tech-savvy than Gen Y gives them credit for, b) probably drawn by the variable font-size and contrast settings that make books easier to read, c) possibly buying kindles in the interest of reducing paper usage, and d) reading a lot of books. Today I decided that people over 50 kick ass, but people over 80 get no sympathy from me. (Don’t let me get old, friends.) Also, read newspapers on the kindle (or some similar device). Newspapers going all-digital are smart, contientous and likely to outlive paper-only stubborn mules. My newspaper never gets read. Ever. At least not by me…. why bother when CNN gives me all the national news via text and wifi? No wasted paper, no wasted labor, no sifting through things I’m not interested in. Bowl of win, folks.
