Is it just me or is this time of year when the catalog population explodes?

Daily I dump five or six catalogs, most of which I never requested. Most don’t make into the house. They go directly from mailbox to recycle bin. And yes it’s better to recycle the junk mail rather than toss into the dumpster, but it’s a step I don’t want have to do as frequently or to the degree that I do.

Although the recycling program for the city of Atlanta is much better than in many parts of the metro area, I cringe with every trip to the paper bin, knowing that somewhere in the world a forest has been mowed to create all of this unwanted reading material. In Atlanta it’s said that daily we lose a football field of trees because of development projects, i.e. high rises, condos, new homes, strip malls, etc. That’s a lotta trees, that’s only one metro area among thousands of paper consumers, that’s just one of the many ways we show tremendous disrespect for our natural resources.

However, thanks to a new FREE catalog opt-out service I discovered in mid-October, hopefully this will be peeve of the past. Hopefully I’ll be recycling fewer catalogs because I’ll be receiving fewer catalogs period.

The service is offered through CatalogChoice.org. Although rather new, they have already had more than 140,000 people sign-up to opt-out. In October when I first looked at the site, about 80,000 people had joined. So, within a month, another 60,000 have declared a desire to make a difference.
The organization’s bio: “Catalog Choice is a sponsored project of the Ecology Center. It is endorsed by the National Wildlife Federation and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and funded by the Overbrook Foundation, the Merck Family Fund, and the Kendeda Fund.”

Their mission: “The mission of Catalog Choice is to reduce the number of repeat and unsolicited catalog mailings, and to promote the adoption of sustainable industry best practices. We aim to accomplish this by freely providing the Catalog Choice services to both consumers and businesses. Consumers can indicate which catalogs they no longer wish to receive, and businesses can receive a list of consumers no longer wanting to receive their catalogs.”

The opt-out process is simple. You create a profile. You select the catalogs you don’t want to receive from their browsable and searchable list of catalog merchants. You fill in your customer number on the back of the catalog if it has one. You save the selection. CatalogChoice.org sends the merchant an email saying you’ve chosen to opt-out. Within 10 weeks the merchant is supposed to have removed your address from their database. Should a merchant ignore your request, your opt-out list includes a way to rat on them.

Yes, there will be a period of time when you have to remember yet another login, and maintain your opt-out information in yet another online profile. Sometimes we have to give a little, to get a little. But if more of us give a little with regard to unwanted junk mail, we get a lot back – a planet of thicker, healthy forests.

Should you sign up today, keep in mind that it will take time to see a difference. And the merchants have already compiled their holiday mailings, so don’t expect that the catalog flow will ebb for 2007. You can, however, start now and begin changing the contents of your mailbox for 2008.

Give trees a chance, my friends. Sign up.

On Thursday I participated in an event that was not a typical trait of my usual M.O. Not only did I have a vendor spot at the Ladies Who Launch Atlanta Live event, but I also signed up to facilitate a breakout session. It was not my modus operandi to voluntarily spend a whole day making in-person small talk during which I’m the primary initiator of said small talk. For the past couple of years, much of my time has been spent on the phone or at the computer. Like any underused muscle, my face-to-face skills have gotten a bit flabby.

I learned so much about myself from this experience, and I’m puffed with pride that I pushed myself out of my comfort zone. Although I didn’t hit a home run from a performance standpoint, in many ways I had several base hits.

For one, I discovered that I like these events. I like what they ask of me. I like the possibilities they bring. I like the people and the wide opportunities to be curious about people and make chit-chat. And, it’s nice to see the faces of the people who — you never know — might someday become clients.

Three days later, I’m still all abuzz and inspired.

That, my friends, can be the beauty of expanding your M.O., or of redrawing the map of your M.O., or of simply high-tailing it out of your own comfort zone.

Here’s the thing — I could go back to the old M.O. It hasn’t disappeared. It waits, it’s waiting to see if I’ll come back. But I don’t want to. Now that the lid of my M.O. can has been lifted, I want it open, not closed. I want to keep nudging it up more and more. Eventually, the edge that binds lid to rim will rip, and the lid will pop, exposing the mouth of this can to all that it might be. Gives me goosebumps.

This week’s Newsweek has an interesting interview with gynecologist Hilda Hutcherson who wrote the book, “What Your Mother Never Told You About S-e-x.” (I haven’t read this book, mind you, so I can’t vouch for what it’s about other than the obvious). And although the book title is provocative, that’s not what grabbed my attention in this interview.

Hutcherson has a longhorn of a beef with how women are under constant pressure to be physically perfect. “We are dissecting women into many little parts,” she says, “and each part needs to be surgically or medically altered so that you can become the perfect woman.”

That made me want to shout Y-E-S! If you think about how much of our time could be spent in plucking eyebrows, buffing elbows and heels, scouring leg’s for the first hint of spider veins, conducting “droop” surveys, counting gray hairs, examining pores, pinching for inches, choosing the bag that best non-matches the shoes, etc., etc. The list of inspection items on the average woman’s grooming list is insane. And even those of us who rebelliously skimp on some of them will confess in an honest moments that we sometimes worry that our skimps are obvious, that we’re judged in turn and lose out somehow because of the beautification rituals we resist doing.

Hutcherson blames the media for the pressure and the predicament of women under pressure to be physically perfect, and on that point I have to veer. The media, although, an undeniable and irritating participant in this crap, is not the only culprit. Women share ample accountability. We buy into it day after day. We buy the magazines with the advertisements for anti-aging serums next to the articles that encourage us to espouse aging. Our discretionary spending is allotted to facials and creams and doodads. We tell ourselves that beauty is a depreciating asset, something only skin deep, but we’re always assessing our skin and the skin of others, comparing our beauty portfolio to that of the other women around us.

We’re adult enough and experienced enough to be able to do what Hutcherson desires: to say “enough already.”

It will take a many-serpented gorgon to confront this many-headed hydra. It will take more than a vent among kindred spirits and a severe wag of unmanicured digit for the force of this sentiment to be known. It will take the power of the purse. It will take open declarations of independence from the pressure to perfect. It will take some ambivalence and indifference, too, turning our backs on the influences that refuse to listen. It will take shifting the way we values ourselves, the women we know, and the women we don’t know. It will not be easy, trailblazing never is.