Do postcards count? I tend to send a lot of postcards when I'm traveling, although with the increasing ubiquity of Net cafes (not to mention distant friends with an open couch and Net access) even postcards are starting slip out of my travel habits.

I think the last letter I sent was to my grandparents more than six months ago. Wow. Makes me feel like I should go write another now, lest I slip totally into the apocalyptic future envisioned for us all in "21st Century Digital Boy" and "Red Barchetta".

Well, the confinement issue is moot; both options keep me locked in. I think I'd go the fish route. I've always wanted to live somewhere with Roman columns or a Wizard's Castle, and the other fish (were my ichthyological attempts at woo to fail) would give me a sounding board for the big questions. Like what exactly it is we eat every day--skin flakes of the gods? Some sort of macrobiotic Frooty Pebbles? And why can't we get a nice, juicy earthworm every once in a while? I mean, all those horror stories can't be true...

Five (stove, microwave, kitchen wall, bedroom alarm, bathroom). That seems like a lot of clocks for a one-bedroom apartment. It doesn't even count other devices I have that tell time--computer, stereo, cel phone, GPS unit.... Of those, my favorite would have to be the one on my kitchen wall. It was relatively cheap, yet it's still pretty stylish--black numerals on a clear disc set a few inches out from the wall. Late at night, when just the lights in my living room are on, it casts great shadows on the wall.

A quick Google search hints at exactly how much tea we're talking about--somewhere in the neighborhood of 560,000 metric tons, assuming that if you cleaned out every warehouse and kitchen cabinet in the country you'd have about a year's production. That's a lot of tea. Especially considering that I don't drink tea.

I suppose the first thing I would do would be to start drinking tea. I would drink tea until I went completely mad. Phase Two would be selling enough tea at bargain basement prices to fund the rest of the plan. Step Gamma would be to lure Laurence Tureaud into my schemes and convince him to change his name to "Mr. Tea" as the cornerstone of my marketing plan. Then Operation Breakfast Soliloquy would begin: trained InkTea operatives would travel to every town in the continental United States with a population under 1,000 and stay in residence until everyone in the locality was an enthusiastic consumer of our product (Note that this phase would be subsidized by a reality game show, with cash prizes going to the first operative to 'teaify' their assigned location, and the chance for viewers to become operatives and join the game.) Every citizen of each town would be deputized into the "Tea Posse" and ride across the land selling our product (using only as much force is necessary) until our planned invasion of the top seven metro areas sometime in 2009. In case things would go awry, from day one Team PN6-5K will be hard at work constructing our Alaskan hideaway, Teatopia, to where we could retreat and construct orbiting laser satellites while we wait for our next chance to strike.

Oh, and somewhere along the way I'd smash the record for tea servings in a day in a massive event held somewhere like, say, the Minnesota State Fair. Mr. Tea would do the serving.