Tales of a Librarian

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):

I was telling em_kellesvig my latest story idea tonight (basically a Renfaire Roadtrip, as she described it afterward) and it occurred to me I might be a fairly good writer but I'm a terrible storyteller. I mean, the ideas are all there in my head but I can't get them out verbally. Something happens between brain and mouth that doesn't happen between brain and hands.

I wonder if that's John's problem as well. :\

so rewatching Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, what a touching moment when Holga dies heroically having saved their world from the scourge of the creepy tattooification of the Thay -- me, I'm only for consensual tattooing -- but when Edgin is having his big moment! of realizing he could, I dunno, gee, bring his best goddamn friend in the whole wide world back to life, why is the only motivation he sees in his mind's eye touching scenes of Holga being motherly toward Kira?

Is that the only reason Holga deserves to live? Because she's so mommy to his kid? I mean, I get it, his journey is realizing he needs to be less selfish -- not choosing to bring his wife back, but rather the true mother of his daughter, blah blah blah, but wow, Holga is so much more than that, and has BEEN so much more than that throughout the film, so yeah. I hugely resented it on her behalf, because his thoughts are once again selfish -- I bring you back to life bec you are surrogate mother to my child! not because you are a human being with her own destiny and I want to see you live it.

wow, I didn't realize how pissed I was.

Holga is so awesome tho.