Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Containment Failure
I do tend toward an extreme loyalty towards certain inanimate objects. There have been jackets, backpacks, and knickknacks that I held onto long after they’d ceased being appropriate for public use. In all these cases, I endured the aspersions of my peers for the hedonistic satisfaction of an un-updated look. I kept those objects around - right up until they stopped being useful to me,. But then, of course, I got rid of them. Once something’s not useful, it’s not beautiful anymore. Or something along those lines.
That’s why I don’t understand why I don’t seem able to get rid of my lousy tupperware. I swear, it’s been a piece of crap for at least a year. I use it almost every day to hold my mainstay luncheon salad - a weighty mix of greens and veggies and shredded roast chicken. Oh yeah, and the raisins and slivered toasted almonds too, and then feta chunks on top.... mmm, yeah. And dressing.
Damn. Vinaigrette. It’s all gonna piddle away. My old salad bowl tupperware stays sealed for the thick and viscous dressings, and even handles those that have a pretty fast pour. But once you get down to something that’s basically oil and vinegar, that stuff’ll just work its way out of the closed container and right into my lunch bag. No matter how I try to keep it flat, it always somehow tips over and all the dressing dribbles out the edges. I put my lunch, including some fruit and bread and maybe a cookie and of course the tupperwared salad, into a plastic shopping bag, so leaky dressing usually doesn’t get all over everything. Instead, I get a nice plastic sack of salad juice, in which the bread and fruit and Tupperware container marinate odiferously. I have to towel everything off as I pull it of the bag out or it’ll spew juices all over my desk and pantlegs.
Of course, some days my plastic sack turns out to have a nice big hole in it, or a rip or a tear, that basically acts as a drain for all that runny watery salad dressing I’ve wasted on my mostly-dry salad that day. The dark colored, strongly scented liquid escapes, naturally, from the lunchsack into the interior of my messenger bag, tinting and perfuming my most important and needful possessions. And since I eat a lot of salads and we keep buying the cheap, tasty vinaigrette at TJ’s, I keep having these dressing blowouts. It’s getting so I put the salad in a secondary, smaller, more reliable, auxiliary bag. I seek to minimize consequences (leakage) by planning for them (baggage). The underlying problem (lameage of tupperwarage) persists. In short: I need a new damn salad bowl.
Why I don’t get one, I can’t say. I see them often enough, but I always tell myself, “I’m not buying that right now. I’m on a different errand; I can find better for less somewhere else.” There’s always some excuse and I cleave to it reflexively. Well you know what? I’m not buying that anymore. Putting this down on paper so plainly for myself impels me to do what I’ve had to do for too long. If this blasted writing project that is this “internurt” of yours has one single positive impact on this sorry old planet we call home, it’ll be this: It will force me to replace my tupperware saladbowl for lunch. And it’s about goddamn time.
