Does that count?

Come to think of it, if your question applies to people, isn’t that what Facebook is all about? Reconfiguring previously inert relationships with people from your past, and breathing new life into them by making them easier to maintain, because of dramatically reduced expectations?

To answer your question more literally, I ran into a friend on BART yesterday who said he was thinking about using the output of his paper shredder as bulking material for a composting toilet.

What I find most interesting about the question is that reusing old items does two things: (1) saves the old item from being landfilled; and (2) avoids the need to buy a new item. So mixing this with your core concept of “formerly,” should we be thinking in terms of of how to transform other people in our lives, rather than ourselves? Very different from missing, acknowledging, saying goodbye to, etc. a former version of ourselves, which seemed like the starting point for the whole blog. Put differently, if my spouse was formerly hot, and I was (just supposing here), can we now accept each other as middle agers? Or, to put a finer point on it, can we embrace the fact that it’s a different kind of relationship now than it was before, that we’ve lost some qualities we had before, but gained others?

Or maybe that’s a bad analogy. The vegetable steamer hasn’t lost its ability to steam. It’s more of a giving tree type situation where the demand has changed. With formerlys, we have actually lost some features we once had, independent of whether the demand has changed.

I guess I’m having trouble with the question, trying to figure out how I could have a new use for something that doesn’t really exist anymore. Or maybe my confusion is the result of composing this while simultaneously trying to watch “Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages” on my computer.

One final note, though. Your post shows how much of this is in one’s head. (Duh, you will inevitably say.) What I mean is, while it’s obvious that how we react to our formerly is all up here, you also illustrate that the formerly itself may just be a projected construct. I steam vegetables all the time. I don’t associate it with dieting at all. I like the taste of, say, steamed fresh beets, and I also like how healthful they are. I mean, how the hell else do you make spaghetti squash? Sorry to question the question, but I guess I’m a bit of a troublemaker this morning.