Recyclemmings

Tonight I got home and discovered that several people on my street had put out their blue recycling bins next to their garbage bins. But I'm pretty sure it's not recycling day. Or is it? Why would they have put them out if it wasn't the right night? How much is in my bin? If it's not overflowing, it's not recycling night. Plus, I just cleaned out the garage a week and a half ago, and I had all the boxes in there...

It was like all of a sudden, their confusion had affected me! I almost put the bin on the street. I seriously can't let a recycle day go by, because while we average only one small bag of actual garbage a week, we recycle like mofos... If my recycling doesn't get picked up, the house starts overflowing with newspaper and water bottles.

I was also thinking that it's funny how if one person accidentally puts the blue bin out, it's like contagious, and other people start putting theirs out, too. I thought, "there should be a word for that..."

Which started me on an entirely different tangent. See, in my newspaper, there's this TERRIBLE trend toward trying to make the paper more appealing to younger readers. Ultimately I guess it's a good thing if it secures the future of the newspaper industry, because I LOVE my newspapers. But I want my newspaper old-people style. It doesn't have to have graphics on the header. It doesn't have to have teasers to stories inside. It should eschew crapass fluff pieces where editorials used to be. And I certainly don't need news articles that use slang terms like "gonna" unless it's a pretty necessary quote.

I was thinking that there's a really lame semi-regular feature on Sundays written by one of the Bee's two trendoid Lifestyle reporters. I'm fairly sure it's called "So Sacramento." and the subtitle is "Words that should be in the dictionary but aren't." They're always stupid words like "Thursweekend." (I made that up, 'cause I can't find any of them online, but it's something like that.) Then there'll be the definition: "Thursweekend: the way traffic backs up on Thursdays before a three-day weekend on highway 50 out of town." Then, the mandatory use in a sentence. "Hey, we'd better sneak out of the office early, because it's going to be a Thursweekend out there!"

Anyway, it's stupid and pointless and no one would ever use the words (they tend to be really awkward, long constructions) and it just irritates me. Nevertheless, I like "recyclemmings."