Just a little off

When I first started the blog, I envisioned keeping track of the types of downsizes I completed.

I quickly discovered that even the free Blog sites are amazingly versatile. I, naturally, am partial to Blogger, but there are many others -- I encourage you to shop around before you begin your blog tomorrow, Dear Readers.

A little experimentation revealed that I could add links, pictures, opportunities for people to "follow" me, track visitors, and even include a year-long countdown on my front page. What I could not do, at least not without an advanced degree from MIT, was create a simple bar graph that visually represented how I was downsizing. From the first day I included a side bar entitled How am I downsizing? in which I categorized that day's downsize. I always intended to switch that over to a more impressive bar graph, but could never figure out how.

As a side note, I made the choice early on to count all of the downsizes from a given day only once. My rationale was that the challenge was, at it's heart, more about doing something daily than ridding myself of a set number of items. Plus, when I recycled an entire box of old school files on Day 2, I couldn't figure out whether that should count as one or a thousand. Easier to stick with the ol' binary code.

This meant that on days when I downsized in multiple ways -- such as both trashing and recycling items -- I needed to make a call about which category in which to count the event. I generally defaulted to the category that had the larger number of items.

Yesterday, after taking a few days off from blogging -- oh, sweet freedom! -- I tallied up my How am I downsizing? chart to discover, highly unsurprisingly, that the numbers didn't add up to the 365 days of the challenge. My Masters Degree may be in literacy, but I do know that 364 does not equal 365.

This led me to pull out a yellow table and, over an hour, go back through every post to determine the definitive How am I downsizing? totals.

With the blog numbers corrected, I took a few moments to ponder the tally. Here are a few observations:

• Precisely one-third of my downsizing days (121) involved giving things away. Being a giver feels good.


• Another eight percent of the downsizes (28) were donations, meaning that over forty percent of my days in the last year have involved giving things to others with the intention of helping or pleasing them. Being a giver feels very good.


• Fifteen percent (55) of my items were recycled. The issue here is that as important as we all know recycling is, I think we still don't really know what it is. I put things in a magical plastic bin, they go off to some mysterious facility and the world's solid waste and global warming problems are solved? Ah, I don't think so.

Which brings me to...

• My second most frequently used method of downsizing was tossing stuff into the trash. On nineteen percent of the days (69), I just threw crap out. While I am willing to take full responsibility for this travesty, it speaks loud and clear about how we are still far too entrenched in a consumer-culture built within a disposable world. I clearly need to redouble my efforts to launch a campaign centered around pushing companies to take more responsible for helping us to recycle the products they profit from. Please vote for me.

But, regardless of how I downsized, at least the numbers add up to 365.