My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

when i decided this morning that i was a stay at home mom i thought to myself,”mom, what’s one dream you’d be willing to give up dreaming and start living?”

a few days ago i dreamed about trading paper with others.

“no one is going to just mail me garbage out of the blue and the wind can blow only so much directly into my garage. i’m going out and picking it up myself and putting it in an envelope,” i said. so i walked down the street picking up rubbish along the way. this project is getting started! you can count on mom.

here it is folks. my half of the dream.

but the dream isn’t over. i dream of someone in china reading this and knowing a second language, like english, and really getting my passion for trash and deciding, “i’d like a pen pal too, one that doesn’t want to actually talk, but would rather get to know me and my culture based on the paper blowing down my road.”

are you ready to give up the dream as well? for less than a dollar you can send garbage through the mail, both nationally and internationally. so what’s stopping you?

of course there needs to be some rules, so we have something to argue about. to start:

1. no plastic wrappers. reason – i hate encouraging/celebrating the use of plastic.

2. categorize your collection

how to categorize: pick one of four categories.

cat. one = foxy
foxy is old paper, so called because old paper normally contains acids that will break down and turn paper brown. (known as foxing)

cat. two = green
green refers to grading lumber, which but for bad karma could have been paper. green lumber is fresh cut, so green paper is new paper. exactly how old can paper be and still be thought of as new? i don’t know.

15 years at most. or even a day, if it is a bus ticket. of course the bus ticket may be past dated, but if it doesn’t look any different overall than bus tickets from last year, who cares? if your bus pass has the same design as it did three years ago, a three year old bus pass is still green.

cat. three = street
street is paper that looks like you picked it up off the street. probably is folded from being in a pocket or possibly dented from car tires running it over. an interesting bubble pattern appears that mimics the texture of hardened tar. in other words, condition isn’t important, because we can photoshop that stuff out or we want it to have the patina of humanity.

cat. four = anal
as in anal retentive, this paper will have no bent corners, no creases, no foxing. in other hobbies it might be called mint, or grade a, but that reminds me of a flavor of chocolate and a cut of beef, respectively. (so why did i choose anal? don’t go there.)

i would rather have it that anal grade trash was not considered to be of more value than street grade trash. seeing something that looks brand new is never as interesting to me as something that looks dirty and used. for instance, i went to a house warming party last night with my upstairs neighbors, and all their friends were wearing clean clothes and had shaved that morning, either their legs or their faces. i felt very uncomfortable. it was as though they were wrapped in plastic.

the weird stains on my jacket and the grease buried in the cracks of my fingers probably freaked them out just as much. that’s the nature of the world. and when a clean person talked to me, most of the time we quickly forgot how the other one looked and we just enjoyed the conversation. which gives me hope for world peace.

so those are the rules for mailing paper to each other.

EXERCISE ONE

grade the following

ANSWER

this is GREEN STREET

teacher’s edition

explain to your students that these items were picked up off the street today by the author, so they are green paper, and they have visible damage to them so they are street. it might be interesting to ask them to point out the creases and folds, especially at the corners, to help them understand what to look for.

a helpful hierarchical tree structure of paper trading nomenclature: