I am allowed to write up to 50 pages to submit to my fiction class on Wednesday night. That comes to 15 bundles of 50 pages. That’s 450 pieces of paper, although to be fair I’ll probably print double-sided, so that’s 225 pages. But every student is going to submit 50 pages this semester, which comes to at least 3375 pieces of paper. Not to mention all the stories we will print out from the internet for classroom assignments. Will any of these pages be recycled? Not many. And God forbid any of us get published – then we’ll just add exponentially to the pages of our prose that are read and thrown away. Good thing all those rejection letters are written on 1/2 page sheets of paper.
By doing some light math, I am accomplishing two goals. I am procrastinating from doing my homework, and I am forced to make the logical conclusion that I am saving the world by keeping most of my words in digital format. Long live the blog, the baby footprint of bad writing.