You know the saying “don’t sweat the small stuff”? Well, this week I am because I’ve just discovered 2000 of those small plastic clippy things that go on the end of a loaf of bread – at the bottom of my freezer.
And then, in the fruit bowl, an entire layer of apple stickers. It’s fruit sticker découpage. One of the kids is also using them to wallpaper the side of the once-very-nice chest-of-drawers in her room.
They are there, carefully arranged alongside a collection of barcodes she’s pulled off the back of books and new sports socks, arranged in such a grand fashion because, maybe, like me, she just doesn’t know what to do with all these little bits of plastic stickiness that have no official name, no brand or special identity of their own, but were once quite useful in their own silly way.
Every day I find them. The plastic ties that connect new clothes with price tags, which I never get around to cutting off, so they bite and itch and scratch their way through my day.
The hair ties that lie in fuzzy corners all over my house, invisible when I need them. The lids of pens, once pretty useful, now obsolete but for the fun they give our puppy. Except when she chokes on them.
Hairy, freestyle, inedible Mentos on the bottom of my bag, making friends with a mountain of supermarket and automatic teller receipts.
Why, oh why, are receipts given out so freely? Who needs to prove they once bought a packet of carrots from the IGA or adds everything up just to make sure they got it right?
In our house, clothes pegs are everywhere, too, because in our house a random, sneaky hug comes with the surreptitious planting of a clothes peg on your person. But you don’t know because it’s a trick, and so go about your day with a peg on the back of your head. Hysterical, yes, except that all those pegs have to fall somewhere.
Then there’s the weird weight-loss posts with pictures of Fifi Box and eggs inside avocados littering my newsfeed. What are those? I never asked for them.
Nor did I invite the spare buttons, those that come in individual plastic packets with new cardigans and slacks, into my house. They are currently residing in the bathroom cabinet alongside numerous nit-removing combs that accompany every bottle but pull at their hair just a bit so are never used, but kept, of course, because you just never know.
Who makes these things? Who puts them in the boxes and sticks the stickers on top? The absorbent paper that lines the meat trays, now red with blood. Strange little packets of beads that come with wraps and two-minute noodles.
All this to contend with and still, every day, new fast-food menus arrive in the letterbox. All for pizza, too, which I don’t eat, never for Thai or Vietnamese or Indian, which I’d much prefer.
Now our fast-food menu collection is epic. It is spilling out of our kitchen drawer. It needs to be curated, itemised, alphabetised, because we may well have every current fast-food menu in circulation, but none for any food I would like to eat.
Stop it, stop the menus and the bread ties, the nit combs and all the small, sticky stuff. I don’t want to not sweat it, I want to kiss it all goodbye.
