I find myself washing dishes when I get really upset. I had just discovered some new information concerning a member of my immediate family. Gently as ever, when I slid the freshly washed glass onto another in my cabinet, it broke in my hand. The sight of the set of 4 glasses (previously 8 in the last decade) reduced by one more, leaving only 3 made me burst into tears. I've been chastised or eye-rolled in the past for my childish personification of material objects. I guess I see where when the item is stripped of it's purpose, it's labor, it is thrown away. Pretty Marxist sentiment here, I know. I recall a time when I was 22 and working my ass off in the heat of my first summer stock theatre program. 5'2" and female, I found I was the heartiest and most dedicated worker of our 4-student crew. The pay was barely enough to live on and the work was grueling - typical for stage work. We had just had a meeting where the higher ups told us that we needed to buy our own insurance (because one girl had just cut a major portion of her finger off with a portable grinder) and I was helping the others carry some steal frames on a dolly, when in a moment we had to negotiate the steel through a small door, I had just turned down a suggestion to ram the lot over a sizable threshhold. They did it anyway and where I was standing there was no choice but for me to catch the whole stack before it fell on my toes. I threw my back out for the first time (and many times subsequently in it's weakened state) and my boss (a young male professor) has the audacity as I limped away, sciatic nerve pinched in my spine, to say "This is Kentucky, Lexi. We put down a horse with a limp."
I know I'm breaking down, like a glass, a fruit, a horse. And surely this is why people make plastics. These
plastic jars are no solution to my death fear, but they are recyclable. And they never shatter.
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