The Chronicles Of Jessica

I've stopped buying bottled water for our house because I feel guilty about the environmental aspect of it. A heckton of petroleum goes into making all the plastic that we use in such a mindless fashion, and it gets on my nerves. The water bottles aren't even made out of recycled plastic, as far as I can tell. They have that little logo on them to encourage you to recycle the bottle instead of throwing it out, but come to think of it, I don't know that I've ever seen anything that indicates a product has been made out of recycled plastic. I worry that recycling is probably a total hoax. I've never actually seen them pick up our garbage but I have little faith that the bottles and cans we so painstakingly rinse and separate are actually making it to the recycling stage. The guys who collect it can barely manage to get the empty bins back onto the sidewalk, which is not exactly rocket science.

What a tired analogy, rocket science. I'm exhausted today. I literally sat here with my fingers over the keyboard for like two minutes trying to think of something else to make the point. But I once heard this NASA guy on the radio talking about how, among rocket scientists, they use that joke all the time and then laugh heartily at the irony of it. Which is cute/nerdy in a way that appeals to me. Though it has nothing to do with what I was saying.

Anyway, I'm probably exhausted because I'm dehydrated, because I'm not drinking as much water as I used to when I was getting the bottles. I am very weird about water. When I was a kid I never ever liked it, unless it was absolutely ice cold and even then it was a struggle for my mother to get me to drink anything that wasn't fizzy. Of course she could have been plying me with San Pellegrino, but I don't know how readily available imported Italian sparkling water was in Alabama in the early eighties.

I used to think San Pellegrino was the stupidest thing in the universe, and so bourgeois I could not even handle it, and then I worked at Orso in New York City (they're bastards, never eat there) and I actually tried it. We were allowed to take the leftovers if people didn't finish their whole bottle and it was delicious! Don't get grossed out, the customers were pouring it out of the bottle into glasses on their table so it's not like we were sucking up the backwash of random NYC tourists or something. But I loved it! It was totally refreshing and tasty. I would buy that all the time, except I'd be having the same carbon-footprint angst that I have over the plastic bottles, slightly lessened by the fact that the San Pellegrino bottles are glass. I don't really know if producing glass is bad for the environment. And if it is, don't tell me. The guilt buffet table is over laden right now, mkay?

So for whatever reason, I don't like drinking water from the tap. Maybe I saw Erin Brockovich too many times, I don't know, it just kind of weirds me out. Though I will drink water out of a water fountain at the gym with no problem, and I have no problem drinking tap water at restaurants. I'm a mass of contradictions. My new system now is to try and buy one bottle of water and keep refilling it at the water cooler at TempLand or at the gym or wherever. This was working more or less okay, except I wasn't really getting as much water as I needed because I kept finding myself out and about and getting thirsty and needing to buy another bottle. Then Paul would see this half empty bottle hanging around and he'd pour it out and recycle it. I think he's under the impression that water goes bad, like juice or Lactaid. These deeply held beliefs take time to correct, but I'm working on it.

So I tried having one on my desk and one at home. This didn't seem to be working and I couldn't figure out why until I realized that the cleaning crew at the office building was throwing my water bottle away every night. Why they would take it upon themselves to do this, I have no idea. Maybe they think water goes bad, too. There's no recycling here, either, which means they've just been getting tossed in the garbage. So all this effort I'm making to try and improve my personal petroleum consumption is just being thwarted at every turn, and I'm THIRSTY.

The fact that we have to pay for water at all kind of galls me. It should just be given to us as citizens. That's what the Romans did, right? That's what that aqueduct business was all about? A civilized society should provide water to its people.

And postage. How can it cost forty cents to mail a damn letter? Water and postage. I don't ask for much.