Ideas, Randomness, Startup stuff

I was cleaning out my desk at work today, my second to last day, and feeling guilty for throwing away various marketing tchotchkes, like the rubber bouncy ball, company logo'd calendar and cheap company logo'd clock when it occured to me: Over a long enough period, everything is trash. Sure, some of it I might pass on to other people. But if you think about 1,000 years from now, at some point, all of this junk will have ended up in a trash pile somewhere. Rather than depressing, I find this liberating.

Now I can throw away anything without feeling bad about it. The only reason to feel bad is if, perhaps, by passing it on to someone else, it would prevent some substitute from being created--like passing on our dingy blender to a neighbor.

Speaking of passing things on to neighbors, our apartment building has a magical table in the entrance. It has the ability to absorb random crud. I started putting last-stop-before-the-trash items on it; I'm amazed at what the magical table can absorb. Off the top of my head:

• a gigantic bag of plastic hangars
• 3 big bags of fake silk rose petals
• a purse with a picture of audrey hepburn
• the last harry potter book (gone in minutes)
• several boxes worth of books (90% gone)
• a wooden decoration with a knitted cat
• 3 ancient laptops with no hard-drives
• cheap, old, hard-wired phone

The magic table balks if you use it to dispose of something you originally found on the table. Also, it has a limited appetite for votive candles and it is utterly unable to digest Bridget Jones books--too bitter, maybe?