Silverware. I have been trying to train myself to use actual silverware instead of chopsticks to eat certain foods. The practical reason for this is that all my old, bamboo chopsticks got moldy in this new, wet apartment and I have not had the chance to replace them yet. Really, though, I just think that it’s kind of silly eating pesto chicken linguine with a pair of chopsticks.

Plates. Recently I’ve slowly starting the shift from sub-dollar plates to three-dollar plates. My entire kitchen was outfitted with the cheapest items that I could find in Ikea. This means that, for over three years, I’ve been using forty-five-cent (later seventy-five-cent due to economic hardships, possibly in Sweden) plates and bowls. They work, sure, but they don’t look very fancy or nice for dinner parties. So now I have three three-dollar plates from a kitchen surplus store. Maybe, one day, I’ll graduate to buying real dishes from real retail stores.

Glasses. It’s amazing how long it took before I got some wine glasses. Maybe it’s because I haven’t really started drinking wine until this past couple months. Before I had wine glasses, I drank wine out of the old Pom glass bottles that looked like glasses. Not acceptable.

Bonus Story: Cotton Swabs. Currently, I have in my possession a pack of 180 organic, bio-degradable cotton swabs made from the finest fairly traded cotton and stems made from recycled paper. They are the apex of green ear-swabbing technology. They also cost about six times as much per-swab as a bulky pack of 500 conventional cotton swabs available at the local Target. Now, my problem: what do I do with these bio-degradable cotton swabs? Should I carefully wrap them up in bio-degradable tissue paper and bury them under a patch of soil under my porch? Should I toss them together with other vegetable waste and have them bio-degrade in the stomach of local pigs? It just doesn’t seem proper to toss them, along with regular trash, into the dumpster. These wonderful, super-green cotton swabs really deserve their own special burial.

Wing :: Dec.02.2008 :: Posts :: No Comments »