The big box. Image: Me.
I ran out of salt the other day and it was very exciting.
Running out of salt doesn’t happen often in my home because I buy the big box of Morton’s Kosher Salt. That big box contains three pounds of salt. That’s a lot of salt to get through even for me, a gal who puts salt on everything she eats unless it’s ice cream, and even then, it could happen.
There was a terrifying moment a couple mornings ago when made my scrambled eggs. I had hit the bottom of the previous box of salt but had not yet gotten the new one. I panicked a little and seized the 99.999% empty box, shaking a pathetic cloud of salt dust over my plate. It worked well enough, but it put the fear of Jehovah in me. I wrote “BUY SALT!!!” on my to-do list. At the top.
On my way home that evening, I popped by the store and got my new salt. I wondered to myself as I lugged it home in my totebag* who I might be by the time I finished this box.
I will surely be in my second year of graduate school; there’s no way I’m going to consume quite that much salt from now until late August, am I? I think that would be bad. Will I be in a new relationship? That last box of salt was used in preparing meals for a few gentleman, if I may be frank. (None were named Frank. Maybe I’ll meet a Frank.)
Maybe when I finish that box of salt, all my dreams will have come true and I will be sublimely happy and want for nothing and lack nothing and be this perfect, happy, beneficent, magnificent being that sort of floats along and makes the world a better place and causes no suffering and doesn’t make anything worse.
But I’ll probably just be making scrambled eggs.
*Chicago has implemented a 7 cent bag tax for every plastic or paper bag used for carrying purchases from a store. Grocery stores, convenience stores, department stores — no purchased object is safe. When they announced this, I thought it was just grocery stores for some reason. People were grumbling, but I didn’t think too much of it; it couldn’t add up to too much, I usually have a totebag, anyhow, and if it leads to fewer plastic bags in the world, this is probably good. But then I realized the tax is on all bags! If you purchase one thing every day, on average, and it comes in a bag, that’s $25 a year. It’s annoying, is what I’m saying. Also, I promise not to do any more math in a post for a long time.