This morning, as I coax my dulled brain to active duty after a unsatisfying night’s sleep, I’m wondering about drinking glasses.

I have a contradictory relationship to drinking glasses.  For one thing, I tend to use more than I should during the day.  There are times that I could easily get by with a single glass, but I often don’t.  I’m convinced that this behavior is informed by a combination of laziness and cognitive overload.  Dealing with the latter first, I say cognitive overload because, like many of us, I tend to be trying to think about too many things at once.

I don’t know exactly where I fall on the scale of being able to juggle between 5 – 9 thoughts simultaneously.  However, I have no trouble of finding at least nine things to ponder at any given time.  This facilitates the ability to forget what I’ve been doing and, more importantly, what I was doing and where I was doing it.  Thus, orphaned, partially empty glasses of water occasionally wind up in unexpected places like bathrooms, bookshelves and the occasional closet.  (Remind me to tell you about the time I found orange juice in the cupboard with the glasses – otherwise, I’ll forget.  I’m blaming this one on cognitive overload, where my brain decides, somewhat randomly, to drop thoughts much like Sawyer jumping out of the helicopter so his fellow LOST castaways could make it safely to the freighter.  Well, not actually because a) they saw him jump and b) the freighter blew up anyway.  Maybe it’s more like dropping books when you were carrying too many in the first place.  Yes, let’s go with that.)  At any rate, trying to remember too much at once leads us to forget things – fun paradox.  Which will be my defense in this case.

Laziness, meaning the lack of desire to reuse a glass when it’s so close to approaching empty status that one might as well consider it to be empty – another classic case of too small to measure being too small to matter.  And yet…  for some strange reason it seems like more work to refill an old glass than to reach up and get a new one.

Or does it?

The real reason that we (um, I) don’t want to reuse an old glass is that it somehow seems dirty and less pure that when we filled it in its clean state.  To say that this is ridiculous is… ridiculous.  I mean, it is ridiculous.  Dirty?  Pshaw, it’s only as dirty as you are.

Here’s the other ridiculous thing:  I don’t mind reusing a dirty glass if it’s had a different liquid, like the old milk-to-water switcheroo, which encourages frequent looks of disgust in my household.

Hey, don’t judge me, man – I do rinse it out.

Mostly.

Whatever it is, I blame the modern dishwashing machine, which gives the illusion of making it just as easy to clean multiple things at once instead of a mere few, just because you’re not the one doing the work.  Except for the loading of the dishwasher.  Which kind of negates the whole point.  But illusion rules.

N.B. Apologies to the late David Foster Wallace, whose writings I’m starting to work my way through.  But man, I can’t write sentences like he does, ones that take a complete cigarette to read (or so I guess).