Postage per Year

The travails of the U.S. Postal System are well established. As people have moved toward e-mail and other electronic forms of transferring information, they have needed the services of the postal system less and less. I was curious whether my own experience would bear that trend out. 

In my case, however, there are a few things that might mitigate against a decrease in the amount I spend on postage each year. First, I have generally not moved toward using e-payment systems. Second, back in 2008, I decided to make a concerted effort to submit more manuscripts for publication than I had previously been doing. (I used to submit an average of about 20 manuscripts a year; I now submit about 120.) At the same time, however, more of more publications accept electronic submissions, which means that many of those manuscripts don't go through the mail.

So what does the record bear out? In general, despite the rise in manuscript submissions, the amount I spend on postage has, for the most part, gone down most years. At best, I match the postage of the year before I started submitting more. 

OkCupid Contacts

So a few months ago, I was talking with a female friend of mine regarding OkCupid, a free dating site. She's not impressed by many of the guys' profiles on there, like, What are these guys thinking? Nor is she often impressed by the messages they send. I was curious about the number of messages she gets per week, mostly because I wanted to see how that stacks up with me, as a guy. Unfortunately, she didn't answer the question directly; she simply said it depended on how often she was on. (This is a true answer, though; the more one is on, the more often one comes up in searches and the more likely you look like a person who is actively using the site and thus like a person who might be dateable.)

I signed off of the site in December, when another gal contacted me and I realized that I really wanted to focus on one gal in particular who I first went out with in August. I hadn't written to many women on OkCupid in a long while anyway, since I have a very specific kind of person in mind to date and haven't really found it there--nor did I ever really expect to. If I were more keen on just going out on friendly dates with no real potential of anything more than a new friendship, as I sometimes get in the mood to do, I might be tempted to write more women. Indeed, to my chagrin and disappointment, I have returned to a period, as of last week, where that again appears to be the case and have thus returned to having a posting on OkCupid and other such sites.

I suspect that on OkCupid I probably get a 10 to 30 percent return rate on my initial messages. Such seems to have been the case in my memory. My profile has typically been rather untraditional--and it really hasn't said much about me in an explicit form. And that seemed to work, strangely enough.

My Plenty of Fish profile (which I also took down in December and refreshed this past week), by contrast, is quite sincere and generally has received no responses. I remember once, a few years ago, writing to about fifteen women on there, receiving two "no thanks" replies, and only one message that led to any kind of communication--that is, a string of messages and a planned date. In the end, the woman decided she didn't want to go out on the day of the date and then stopped communicating. (As I recall, shortly thereafter, I ended up going out with a woman from OkCupid, one who replied back of probably five or so I messaged.)

On OkCupid, I am just goofing off--I am not serious. But that is probably less threatening and more amusing; the fact that a woman doesn't know up front the kind of person I am looking for leaves more room for anyone to e-mail.

And it also has led to a few people writing to me out of the blue, rather than me as the guy taking the lead. So here's how many women messaged me to say they liked my profile or didn't like it or just wanted to say hello or whatever, by way of introduction, on OkCupid, by month for 2010 and 2011:
So basically, as a guy, I was getting, in those two years, on average about one message out of the blue every two months. I'd be curious to know how this stacks up with other guys, as well as other women.

Miles Driven per Year

The miles I've driven each year have gotten higher over the course of the past six years, when I bought my current car. There's a notable jump in 2008, and that's when the only car rental company in town stopped allowing people to rent cars and drive out of state. Before, I'd always done long trips in a rental car; now I have to put the miles on my own car. My own car is nice, so the rental cars were often, in terms of comfort, a step down. Still, I don't like that an extra two to four thousand miles now goes on my vehicle per year.

Another big jump happened at the beginning of 2011, when my church split, as I now have to drive an extra thirty miles per week (fifty instead of twenty). In fact, because I bus to work and walk home three days a week, most of my mileage in a given year is for church--and those aforesaid long trips (this year, one to Texas and one to Florida).

Number of Classmates Who Kept the Same Faith

A minister said in a sermon recently that, in his experience, fewer than one in ten children stay faithful to the religion in which I was raised. I had always thought the numbers more like one in two. However, with the church that I grew up in having completely overhauled its doctrinal beliefs and then subsequently splitting apart, I thought indeed among my generation--which was in its early twenties at the time--the number might be one in three. So I figured I'd go back and check out my old high school yearbook (my high school was affiliated with the church), and try to figure out just how many still follow the old ways.

I was thinking I wouldn't know the status of many--and I don't. But I have more knowledge than I thought I might--rumors of where people have gone, occasional run-ins at church activities (rare these days, since we've all scattered into different places, both church-wise and state-wise), some contacts on Facebook, or other online networks. So here it is, a rundown on those who still hold to the old faith:

The graphs pretty much confirm what I thought. If my guesses are correct, than 40 percent of the students in my class stayed with the religion in which they were raised. On a most liberal scale, the percent might be as high as 63 percent (which I highly doubt), but on the most conservative, the number would be around 21 percent--still not anywhere as slim as what this minister estimated.

That said, we're talking about children who went to a religious school. That could have an affect on how many stick with the religion, though the effect might be both positive (knowing more about the faith than kids gaining a secular education) and negative (being disgusted by some actions of those at the school such that their faith in the religion is damaged). Years ago, one minister quoted some statistic that children of ministers were more likely (possibly twice as likely) to stay part of the religion; if this is true, then it would follow that the effect of a religious school would generally be more positive than negative.