The Last Word On Nothing

I didn’t even read your horoscope today, but I can promise you will obtain more swag soon. It is written in the stars, and in your company’s annual earnings report. You will go to a conference, a baseball game, a meeting about an annual report, a meeting about a master plan, a wedding, a bar mitzvah, a school fundraiser for your kids, a school fundraiser for your alma mater — SOMETHING. And you will come home with more swag. You know what I mean. 

Water bottles! Lanyards! Branded fleece vests you’ll never wear because they are so dorky! Branded fleece hoodies that you’ll wear even though they are dorky because wow, they’re really soft! And worst of all, most of all, the totes. THE TOTES. Don’t even get me started on the totes.

The other day a friend asked about conference swag, because she’s involved in a noble effort to come up with something that is useful, not wasteful, ideally not plastic, and is actually functional. She wanted to know if a group of us had any suggestions. Uh, paper? I stuttered, via text. Like, some good Post-Its? I like Post-Its. Water bottles? Just no totes. On that point, everyone agreed. 

“Everyone at this scientific meeting donates to NPR and subscribed to the New Yorker, we’re good for totes, thanks,” another friend chimed in.

So then what if — and hear me out, I imagined my friend saying — what if there was NO swag, but just maybe free beer? Or financial help, maybe travel funds to attend said conference? A noble effort indeed. But at first, I wasn’t sure. I’m so used to swag. I’m spoiled, I guess. I expect a branded water bottle or at least a friggin’ pen. 

Yet the question lingered. I thought about it again when I opened my kitchen cupboard to look for a water bottle to fill. Free, free, free, cheap, free, Nordstrom Rack clearance, REI, free. We have so many water bottles, they were starting to stack up on each other. I picked up my phone, because I am a sad human. I opened Amazon, which is my Kryptonite, and looked up “water bottle organizer.” Reader, I am ashamed to admit that I added a $36 plastic water bottle organizer to my wish list. (This one.) And then I realized what I was doing, and I was horrified. What had I become?

I decided we needed to hoard less swag, not organize it differently. I went on a mission to find swag strewn throughout my house, mostly in my office, and determine whether it could be used or would be better off donated. I KonMaried the crap out of it. I tested probably two dozen pens, obtained from various scientific meetings I’ve attended, and only a handful of them worked. I pulled out knockoff Moleskines from those same scientific meetings. I found at least seven tote bags, in varying combinations of canvas or nylon. I found three coffee mugs, travel and otherwise; six water bottles; 19 lanyards; three strips of Post-It flags; nine Post-It pads of varying sizes; six reporters’ notebooks, including two identical notebooks from meetings two years apart; and one wide-brimmed canvas hat. 

Now, some of this stuff I’ll use. The wide-brimmed hat is from the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array, from when I visited it in 2013, and I will never part with that. But some of the water bottles can go, I mean really. And I do not need this many totes. Not even my daughter, who hoards bags of all sizes, does not need this many totes. I put them into a pile, bound for the trunk of my car — not because I will remember to take them into Schnucks, but because I *might* remember to take them to the food bank truck that comes once a week to the church down my street. I kept the Post-Its. I mean, who doesn’t use those? I felt pretty good about my cleanup. And then I checked the mail. 

On Thursday alone, I received a cardstock exhortation to donate to my husband’s alma mater, whereupon we would receive a branded water bottle — stainless steel! I received a bunch of address labels from the National Wildlife Federation. And I received a coloring book, a bookmark, and some more address labels from the Arbor Day Foundation.

Sigh. At least it wasn’t another tote.

Sad swag photo: Flickr user Andrew, CC BY-SA 2.0