I bought two little ceramic side plates today because:
- I used to be physically enormous in a much more distressing way than I am now, and there is no reason to eat more in a single meal than fits on a side plate.
- If I have more than two or three of any item of crockery, cutlery, or glassware, I will let them pile up in the sink and won't do the washing up regularly enough.
- I don't have room to keep things.
- I fell off my bike in April, and landed on my left hand with a nasty crunch that I didn't notice at the time, as my face hit the concrete less than a second afterward (and my face is something of an attention whore when it comes to being dragged along the ground). My hand feels less bad than it did, but it still hurts, and can't take much weight. Possibly I should see a doctor about it, but I feel like I ask too much of my very lovely GP, who really deserves a patient with less numerous and frequent problems.
- So I can't really do a lot of things as easily as I used to do them. Even typing is difficult, as the action vowels — the ones that do the real heavy lifting in English — are on the left side of the keyboard. I'm not being dismissive; I love "u", "i", and "o" as much as the next person. But, it has to be said, they are standing in a row off to the side, around the same microphone, as the doo-wop girls of the vowel group.
- So since then, in the course of meal preparation, I smashed first one, then the other of my plates because I expected both of my hands to work, and only one of them did.
Being heavily centred around vegetables, chickpeas, lentils, rive, noodles, pasta, etc., most of my meals end up in bowls. In the last couple of months I have dropped bowls at least as often as I have dropped plates, but — as they are more or less hemispherical — they appear to distribute impact shock in a way that imparts a structural resilience lacking in their flatter siblings.
On a couple of occasions I've remembered I have no plates only after cooking plate-appropriate meals, and ended up serving them to myself on the plastic chopping board used in preparation. Which is actually quite practical, but not nice. There's no sense of occasion to it.
Anyway, I was in BigW today, determined to walk out with a couple of little plates. You can't get gender-affirming (or even distinctive in any way) crockery in BigW unless you're a fan of Disney Princesses, and I'm afraid I missed that boat. However, I am pleased to report that given the remaining choice between the $3.50 plain white plate, and the $4 gold rimmed one, I paid $8. Because I'm worth it™.
I had to wash them before using them, because new things have been touched by strangers — some of them foreigners even, who have never heard of football, meat pies, kangaroos, and Holden Cars. (Of course, anything brought into the mould-ridden cockroach-infested building in which I live is immediately dirtier than it could have been before, but we all have queer notions of purity and associated rituals that must be observed.)
As I was lifting the first plate out of the grimy detergent-laced water, it slipped out of my useless left hand back into the sink. Without being used once, the plate had a chip taken out of it's gold rim, and a crack in the glaze running from there toward it's centre.
A few years ago, I would have said I have a choice now: I can either take this philosophically and have an amusing story to tell about how this plate was baptised, and how I know it is mine, or I can get upset about how I have never had, and will never have, nice things. Not even $4 nice things.
Except it's not a choice. People feel how they feel. I don't know how I feel about many things, and am still scared to look. Also, my left hand hurts all the time.