February 8, 2021: Sugar is Sweet, and So Are You, But You Don't Eat Sugar -

This morning, I was invited to break up with plastics.  

That’s what the email said. They even went on, with an extended romance/Valentine’s Day theme:

Roses are red, violets are blue, we're done with single-use plastic and you should be too.

This Valentine's Day, we're working to convince Oregon to break up with single-use plastics.

Let's face it: Our relationship with plastics is toxic. Plastic lasts forever, which sounds romantic until you consider….

For some reason, I felt like my judgmental little brother had come to visit me at college, met my boyfriend, and said, “You can do better.” Maybe that was because the email used the "break up" metaphor. 

Mostly I was annoyed and defensive, though there was also a smidgeon of admitting I probably should do it – break up with plastics, that is. Still, one more assignment, and I do resent assignments. I will put it on the someday list, for now.

In the Before, I went to visit a friend who, after dinner, put stuff away without recourse to plastics. Her fridge was full of glass bowls. I said, “You’re not using plastic,” and she said, “Well, it’s pretty easy to do this much.”  She didn’t lecture, which I appreciated. (Our fridge is full of leftovers in former cottage cheese cartons. So that's not single-use, though I do wish they were see-through.) 

The same friend came to town just recently, and we had an outdoor picnic at a park, for COVID’s sake, even though it was a cold, grey day. I proposed several types of take-out, but she has new dietary preferences, and in the end, we had no take-out. We had celery and radishes and grapes and other delightfully healthy (but not-festive) foodstuffs. She offered to break her own dietary rules because she didn’t want to be “that person,” but I said No, no, it’s okay, honest, we are all That Person now.

Which I believe to be true. We are all getting older and more averse to various things for various reasons, by the minute: Oh, I don’t eat that, I don’t wear that, I don’t watch that, I don’t use that, I don’t own that. (Case in point: for my part, I was going to get a particularly splurge-y take-out I don’t normally eat, because I “get to” eat it if I have Visitors, and of course, I haven’t had a Visitor in months. Yes, I see that there is a solution to this problem.)

I believe we’re getting worse, and I blame the pandemic. I think it goes with We’re All Socially Awkward Now. Some of us who have been out of the social whirl for eleven months have become extremely set in our ways. Some day, when we have social lives again, other humans will say Do you want to do X, and we will say Oh, I don’t do X -- unless we fight that tendency, of course.

Anyway, I have to admit, part of me was having a tiff with plastics today. We got a new plastic (not my choice, came with new toilet) toilet seat and (brace yourselves) it gave me a splinter. It gave me two splinters in close proximity. The new toilet seat literally gave me a pain in the butt.

This is the sort of thing that would make anyone question prolonging a relationship. Also, while I’m questioning things, I want to question the sentence above that begins, “Plastic lasts forever, which sounds romantic until you consider….” Enough with the romance and break-up imagery, Environment Oregon. We grasped the message.