Bag lady reprise

I am heavy with guilt today.


Even though I like to take really long, really hot showers, I try to make up for my wastefulness by conserving in other areas. I compost and recycle my stuff; I compost and recycle other people's stuff. I'll travel with stuff just so I can compost and recycle it. This is part environmentalist and part guilty Catholic. Whilst sometimes it's easier to throw something away, a little voice always seems to call out to me, "wait, is that non-dairy, non-meat product something that can be put in the yard waste bin?" Or, "is the number on that plastic less than seven?" Or, "if I scrub this foil hard enough can it live to see another slice of pizza?"

Once in awhile I ignore that voice. I don't do that very often, because she tends to screech and holler, and nag and nag and nag, and I like to avoid that at all cost. Today, however, I ignored that voice. And, voice, I'm going on the record to say that others convinced me to avoid you, so lay off, would ya?

You may recall in my haste to prepare for the demolition of my kitchen, I came across multiple stashes of Ziploc baggies. Baggies that I could not bring myself to throw away because a) yes, I do have an 80 year-old grandmother living inside of me, b) you can save money and the planet by washing them out and reusing them, and c) that incessant voice would have screamed like a banshee were I to ever approach the garbage can with one of those perfectly good bags in hand. So the bags accumulated, and then I would hide the piles in my last minute efforts to clean my kitchen before company arrived, and then when I found them all during the remodel, I didn't have a sink and I was certainly NOT going to wash them all in the bathtub, so I told the voice to politely go make herself busy and I threw them out.

A little bit of guilt, but I could justify it.

Today was a little more challenging.

About a year ago, we ran a program at work that required 5000 straws. Stop and let that soak in for a second--5000 straws. End-to-end that's well over a half a mile of straws. In fact that's so many straws, that on one day, we bought all of the straws that every straw-selling stores stock in our city. If you were frantically looking for straws on that day and you couldn't find any anywhere? That was because of me.

It turns out the person that requested the straws (and ping pong balls and boxes of stick pins) over estimated on the number of straws we really needed. You mean 5000 was too many? Who would have ever guessed that? And where did those 2000 extra straws live for the past year? In my office. And wouldn't you know, today was the last straw, literally and figuratively.

In a fit to clean my space I started clearing out drawers and realized the first thing that had to go were these straws (and other random accessories). But I felt dread at the thought of throwing the straws away. What if someone, somewhere could use them? Maybe I could donate them. Or maybe I should keep them, they may come in useful some other day. Yes, the day you need 2000 straws, and ping pong balls, and stick pins. But we all know that day will never come, so I did the unthinkable--and threw the straws away.

I cringe just thinking about it. But as the people (names are being withheld to protect the guilty, er, innocent?) who made me do it said, "you do so many other good things, it's okay to be bad just this once." Alright, I may have just paraphrased that, but I swear, they made me do it!

Note to self: Say 10 Hail Marys, an Our Father, and the Act of Contrition, and maybe then I'll have absolved my soul of the atrocity committed upon the straws.

On my own behalf, I would like to add the fact that I didn't just throw all of the materials out. No. I recycled the page of instructions accompanying each set of straws, and I gathered up all of the ping pong balls and took them down to one of the ping pong tables in the building (LMNT moonlighted as the "Ping Pong Ball Fairy"). As for the stick pins, I kept nearly all of the boxes and offered them up to the seamstresses in my life--mostly those who do costumes for the theater troupe. And, best of all, all of these things were stored in, get this, plastic Ziploc bags. So I painstakingly opened and emptied around 40 bags and, yes, I brought all of those bags home with me. I may not have made up for throwing all of those other bags away, but I most definitely replenished my cache. And if you were a crazy bag lady like me (or like your grandmother) you would have done the same.