AO3some

Today I had a bowl of cornflakes for breakfast, my first in a long time, and I realized I slice up my banana the exact same way my pops did: diagonal cuts so the slices fall off the knife instead of sticking to it. I don't remember deciding to adopt his method. But there you go.

How do you slice your banana? Are there other tricks you picked up from parents or friends unconsciously?

So what is absolutely stunning to me but shouldn't be, is we have regressed! Regressed but it's packaged as progress, and I went along with it every step of the way like a little lamb. But no more! I'm tired of this commercialism crappy, and when I say this is absolutely the last iteration of laundry detergent I will buy, I mean it!

It's not my fault, I swear, I went from mom buying the detergent at home, to college, where I followed in her footsteps. She swore by Tide, possibly on the advice of one of her new American friends.

First this Tide:


A white powder with cleaning surfactants, sodium carbonate and sodium silicate to soften the water, also possibly bleach and enzymes to break down food stains, and suds reducers and brighteners and fragrances and such.

Then came the innovative! Liquid in jugs! Wow! Just an excuse to charge more, I think. What was wrong with the powder? Oh, because then you could more successfully rub it in your stains beforehand I guess. I dunno. But jugs meant no more cardboard, just plastic, plastic, plastic:



Then, of course, they came out with pods of the liquid. But the pods were even more ridiculous, because some of them came in plastic jugs as well! And! And, it turns out the pods don't melt entirely: they introduce microplastics into the water system as well as the plastic containers getting tossed in the landfill. Oh, joy. (I skipped the pod step. Maybe because some people were reported to have eaten them. I feared becoming a tide zombie.)

So people tried to solve the pod problem by coming up with sheets! And we were so eager to embrace strips/sheets because they came in cardboard sleeves (I am an eco-warrior!) and weighed absolutely nothing on the walk down to the laundry room, we didn't discover until later that the strips themselves were bonded together with microplastics. (*They often contain polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), a plastic-based polymer, which some manufacturers claim is biodegradable, but its biodegradability is questionable and not well-studied.) Oh, woe!

So, Self, does anyone make, I dunno, powdered detergent that comes in a box? Why, yes! Wouldn't you know. So many different ones. I found one called Meliora that's low-sudsing and unscented and literally takes a tablespoon to clean a giant double-load of clothes and my clothes smell *fantastic*. One tablespoon. Jeez, I mean. It comes in a cardboard tin that you can refill from a cardboard box and I will never, ever step away from powdered plain old surfactant again.

My long laundry journey is done.

(And wouldn't you know it, and this just kills me, but Tide still makes):