As my friends and I have aged, I've noticed our households are brimming with stuff. Not good stuff,either. Old computers, yellowing magazines, tatty clothes. Its not like we don't have new computers, fresh magazines and stylish clothes. It is not because our parents were raised during the depression. It is not because that item might be useful someday. Its just that we forget the notion of depreciation on these things we paid money for. I recall that, when I was younger, I found middle aged and elderly people's houses depressing - all those yellowing books, clutter and worn out furnishings.

I hit the wall when I decided I needed a new house because my house was too small. I went and looked at larger houses and realized that I'd have to pay 300K over my equity to get a new house.

I went home, looked at my impressive collection of Shit and embarked on a campaign to get rid of it. Two boxes of Shit a day went to recycling, friends, the curb, Urban Ore and so on. After one year, I had cleared out so much space that my house was suddenly massive. I was able to have a young relative live with me for two years, which gave me great joy.

I am continuing to de-Shit my house and might use that spare bedroom to do something like fostering kittens or having overnight guests.

Part of my campaign involves not buying things in the first place. I'm a member of two libraries and the time I save not shopping allows me to do volunteer work.

I recommend it. Don't become a prisoner of your Shit.

Anyone can write a self-help book. Lots of them read like cheerleading sessions or the kind of crap that the marketing department cranks out to make other marketing types feel like they're working hard. Don't even get me started on the religious ones.

However, some authors are very credible when it comes to self-help books. One is Dr Gottman of the Gottman Institute. His team has analysed the interpersonal dynamics of couples in great detail for many years. Diet books written by actual dieticians and researchers can be valuable as well. The thing to do when shopping around for a self help book is to look up the authors on the web and see if they've submitted scholarly white papers to scientific journals.

Another filter is repetition, self-reference and those dreadful chirpy little case histories. I don't need to read an entire chapter of repetitive episodes (with names changed, of course) where people's lives were changed by the author's books. I'm not taking the book out of the library if its one big advert for itself.

But, yeah, what everyone said. Its a racket.

Really? Where are they? Do they care? Do they ask the kid, "Hey, how was school? What did you have for lunch? How's the food there?" Do they pack a lunch for the kid? Do they say they are too busy, even though it only takes about 15 minutes to throw a sandwich and some fruit in a lunchbox? Are they lobbying the school to have decent lunches?

What's in the shopping cart?

I honestly don't get it. I really don't. My mother gave me carrot sticks as a snack. I'd get one chocolate bar as a snack, not a big bag of chips. She taught me to pack my own lunch. We had things like meat and vegetables for dinner. She worked from 8AM to 3PM and had a 1 hour drive each way to and from the schools she taught. How could my mom do this and not modern moms? She was even obese. Go figure. My siblings and I are not obese and never were. We figured it was just her. We didn't inherit her obesity, either through behavior or genetics.

So, again, what's with the parents?

I have a secondlife persona somewhere. I worked around with it for a couple of weeks, but it was pretty clunky. For a while, I looked like myself and that was boring. I realized that I never dress up in person because it is expensive and uncomfortable, so I dressed up my avatar. I started her off with a 1950s ensemble, complete with long gloves and a sequinned top. After I fiddled with the hair, I decided, what the hell - I made her look like a young Diana Ross. I wound up "friending" a guy whose avatar was a tuxedoed, dapper type. It was fun flying around.

Then, I started getting invites to African American clubs and India-Indian clubs (the surname I picked was Singh - goes with the Diana Ross thing.)I felt very silly and dishonest and have not gone back in since.

I viewed it as a fun fantasy exercise, but I hear that corporations are meeting in SL and a friend of mine is going to do an online booksigning in SL. There's a real potential for fraud because of people's credulity and the only thing I can say is "caveat emptor" when visiting such a site.

Rowling jumped the shark ages ago and no one noticed.

Shhhhh.