Where Have All the ChapSticks Gone?

America is a culture built upon a slippery slope. We are a people of the addiction, for the addiction, by the addiction.

Just think about it: Alcoholics. Overeaters. Smokers. Druggies. Sex addicts. Potheads.

If there is a commodity, we will - undoubtedly - abuse it.

But there is one addiction that I fear does not get anywhere near enough attention from the media.
Chapstick.

Seriously. There are two types of people in the world - those who are addicted to Chapstick and those who will break out the Blistex only on the driest of wintry days. Only when it’s ten degrees below and their lips are cracking and bleeding and they’re on a chairlift heading up a mountain.
I, unfortunately, belong to the former group of people - the abusers. (And let me just say that it has NOTHING to do with Katy Perry and her stupid Cherry Chapstick.)

Yep, I have an asticktion. My name is Katie and I'm a ChapStickaholic.

If there is not a stick or a pot or a tube in sight, I pace around like a heroin addict waiting for my fix.
The more anxious I become about my lack of chap, the redder my lips get. They scream and burn with hatred over their owners’ stupidity. I have to resort to licking them as consolation which really only exacerbates their chapped-ness.

I’ve been an addict for as long as I can remember. I don’t remember how it started. But either you’re a member of that club or you aren’t. So many people I know never need that stick-o-crack. But for me - well, there’s just no escaping Burt’s vise (such a vice!)

I don’t particularly mind being a lip balm junkie. Unless it’s one of those rare occasions when I’ve changed bags and forgot - the horror - to throw one in.

Really, though, I’m usually quite good about remembering my chapstick. I’d give myself an A- (and that’s pretty amazing considering my forgetfulness). Before I leave my apartment, my mental checklist is something like: purse, chapstick, phone, keys.

Oh yeah, it’s numero dos on my list de importantes.

That’s why it’s so difficult to understand why I have such a poor track record with my sticks and pots and tubes-o-lube. It’s so unfair. Where do they all go???

It’s like that book The Velveteen Rabbit except all the chapsticks in my apartment come alive while I’m asleep and party the night away in true NYC style, hiding themselves by morning. 


Does anyone else have this problem?

I collect chapstick. Let’s see (now this does NOT include lipgloss or lipstick, otherwise we’d be here for hours...oh, and yes, this is my actual lip-stuff drawer. Don’t judge).
 
Four Smith’s Rosebud Salves (two orig, one bramble, one minted). Two Perfumeria Gals. Three Blistex Lip Medex. Two Kiss My Faces. One Banana Republic. One Badger Balm. Four ChapSticks (hate the ones with sunscreen but apparently I’ve got two of them). Some random Aquafina brand kind. Five Burt’s Bees. Bored? OK...I’ll stop there.

I even have a pink Labello chapstick I bought in Rome my Sophomore year of college.

The messed up thing, in my opinion, is not the fact that I have a ridiculous number of lip balms. It’s that I can never seem to find one when I’m in need. Don’t think I’m crazy or anything - even if I did just list all the ones I currently have in my drawer.

You see, like any other addict, I have a preference. A favorito. If you’re a Bud drinker, you’re not really gonna enjoy drinking a Coors Light, now, are you?

My drug of choice is Burt’s Bees.
But maybe I need to start treating my cute yellow tubes with more

R-E-S-P-E-C-T cause seriously, I have never finished one in its entirety.

It’s nuts! They just disappear on me.

Damn you chapstick and your stupid magic disappearing acts.

(Let the record show that after writing this, I cleaned under my bed/couch/butcher block and found three chapsticks in hiding. Makes me wonder. Maybe it’s not the chapstick that’s evil, but rather the apartment...

...spoken like a true addict: Everyone’s lookin’ for someone to blame.)

Bitter Cups-o-Café

I find it most unfortunate that people who have met me in my adult life know me as a sardonic, sarcastic, sneering individual. Most unfortunate indeed.

Alas, there is nothing to do but tell you that I was once a very sweet, kind, caring person (for the most part...we all have our moments). So amiable and benevolent, in fact, that I deemed it my duty to be philanthropic. At the tender age of fifteen, I gave up my Saturday’s to volunteer at my local hospital.

Yes, I would wake up at 8:30 every Saturday morning and be dropped off at the Gazebo Gift Shop where I worked the morning shift. While my peers slept the day away, I chatted amicably with my "coworkers" - women old enough to be my grandmother. And because these elderly women weren’t too quick on their feet, it fell upon me to run the snack counter in the back of the shop.

It was there, in the Gazebo Gift Shop at Sharon Hospital (over ten years ago, gah!) that I had my first encounter with coffee snobbery.

The kitchen at the gift shop was certainly no great shakes. We had the standards: bagels, sandwiches, muffins, juice…and java. I made one pot each of regular and decaf, then poured the brew into thermoses. And these thermoses lasted pretty much the whole day.

One day, just before my shift was over, a woman asked for a cup of coffee. She wanted to know how long it’d been sitting there and I shrugged. Seriously? Coffee was coffee, after all. I handed it to her, she walked away, sipped, and marched right back, demanding I make a new pot. The nerve! Begrudgingly I did so. And now I understand why.

Knowing what I know now, it’s hard to believe that was ever so naïve about a cup of café.

My relationship with joe really took off when I started high school. I’d make Dunkin’s Hazelnut at home and add International’s French Vanilla creamer. Delish! We’ve been pretty serious since then. But I, unfortunately, have become that woman in the Gazebo Gift Shop demanding fresh coffee.

OK, well not demanding. Never demanding. But most sheepishly, passive aggressively trying to get the freshest pot, for sure. I even let people go in front of me if I see that the pot it almost at bare bottom. Because there is nothing worse than old coffee, I tell ya. Nothing. (Alright, well perhaps going to the corner bodega at 3am to find they ran out of Snickers Ice Cream bars is worse.)

For reals, though, freshly brewed coffee is…there are no words. It’s splendiferously smile inducing. Love, love, love it!

By the same token, stale, bitter, burnt java is ferooooociously frown inducing. Hate, hate, hate it. Ruins my whole day. Awful! And Dunkin’s is by far the most absurd, obscene culprit of them all. I don’t understand how they get away with serving customers that watery brown sludge. It tastes like burning toxicity. Like you’re drinking poison. Oh, I’m sorry, do you have a tube running from the bathroom? Probably.

I find that the sludgiest Dunkin coffee comes from the vats. Sure, sure, this is New York City and they do get slammed with out-the-door lines every morning. But why can’t they simply make pots instead of putting it in those thermos-like vats? Trust me, I wouldn’t go to DD’s if it weren’t for their hazelnut and French vanilla hot coffee and their coconut (don’t judge) iced coffee - I hate how Starb’s has only the flavor pumps. They jade the coffee flavor even further.

Dunkin and their stale vats of dirty, flavored water aren't singularly guilty, though. Practically every coffee shop, diner, restaurant, and cart is culpable of serving burnt coffee. They all leave pots on the warmers, sizzling and frying away. Boiling and thickening down to a sepia colored slop.

All decoction delinquents - stale, bitter, and burnt - are equally virulent. They all leave a coating on my tongue, a burning in my throat, and give me a very acute case of heartburn.

Even though I detest every sip of mutilated java, I haven't the heart to dump it down the drain. Nor can I demand a fresh pot - scarred as I am by that woman demanding one of me when I was but fifteen years old.

So I beg thee, dearest coffee shops: make a fresh pot. If the consistency of the coffee is turning to stale sludge, if it has been boiling on the burner for far too long, please. Please just make a fresh pot.