Being in trouble has a way of making the tiniest details poignant memories. I’m not saying I’m in trouble…exactly…but I am saying that I notice the weirdest things at the oddest moments.

This may or may not have happened, but I can imagine myself sitting in the principal’s office as a six year old, getting some kind of lecture, and in the trauma of the moment all I could do was stare hopelessly at a mug full of sharpened pencils on his desk. I’d stare at them so I wouldn’t have to meet the principal’s eyes, but also because somehow I thought that those indifferent, inanimate pencils were the only things in the world that were on my side at the moment. Years later, I would not be able to repeat anything that the principal had ever said that day, but I would remember that mug of pencils until the day I die.

I’ve given inanimate objects personalities for as long as I can remember, but that’s a post for another day.

Today it was a package of cookies. Granted, the cookies were not doing much for me as they slid down my throat to their permanent residence on my waistline, but I couldn’t help but think about where those cookies came from.

Those cookies began as a pile of ingredients in some factory far, far away. Someone I will never meet poured all those ingredients into a vat, mixed them, sent the batter off to be turned into cookies by a machine operated by another human I will never meet. Then they were packaged, inspected, and loaded into a truck by more people who I will never meet, who have no idea who they’re sending those cookies to, where they will end up, or just who will buy them, where they will be taken, who will eventually eat them. Somehow that package of cookies ended up at a grocery store, where they were purchased and thrown into a bag.

Now they sit cozily on the shelf of an angst-y wanna-be writer who finds herself oddly amused by the fact that one package of cookies connects her, somehow, to at least one hundred other people, none of whom she will ever, ever meet.

It was then that said writer told herself to snap out of it and get back to work.

Currently watching “House” with The Boss – so I’m posting the opening song here. It’s called “Teardrop”. 🙂