tupperware cupboard

Household dinners are common where I live. I've always felt "at home" in Boulder, yet this added touch of community and familial sharing makes my house feel even more of a home.

I often confuse the two: home and home. I speak of my residence in Colorado as home, and I speak of my parents house in Liverpool, New York as home. "Back home, we sit on the porch and whistle tunes to the runners and cyclists passing by." "I went home for the holidays and I always get put next to babies on planes." I find no need to distinguish between the two.


Pete's girlfriend, Cat, lives in Tucson, Arizona. She splits time between Tucson and Boulder for the sake of love (seems these distance romances are happening everywhere.) She cooked us up a tasty vegetarian stew the other night and the aroma of home-cookin' spilled into every open cabinet, room and nostril in the house. After we all ate our share, we collectively cleaned and shared dish-washing duties (yep, we're old school - no dishwasher at 4th street.)

Cat's friend Theresa commented on our lack of organization of our tupperware. Lack is a soft word to be used for the scale of organization of this cupboard: it's downright chaos. I believe this to be equivalent to the person who appears to be clean, tidy and organized when in reality the underside of their bed is a more appropriate portrait.

My friend George just wrote up a post about this characteristic that I think is more common than we like to let ourselves believe; we don't notice how prevalent this paradoxical trait is because it is within our mental capacity to lie to ourselves. We tell ourselves we are organized because we have systems in place. We tell ourselves we are ready at any moment to conquer the world because we have worked so hard on our systems.

I don't know that we need to stop lying to ourselves about our level of organization. I don't know that we need to rearrange, catalogue, or regulate the tumultuous tupperware cupboard. I believe a healthy dose of chaos can bring a glimmer of humanity and humor to a household.

My mom would disagree, and all of my other truly OCD friends would laugh, saying that I am applying my free-spirit to the order of the kitchen, which is silly.

However, we spoke about that unruly cabinet and the impossibility of finding matching tops for containers for quite a while. And we've spoken about it before in the two and a half years I have lived at fourth street. To come home to a categorized tupperware cupboard would make it much harder to continue to use the word "home" for both NY and CO without clarifying which "home" I am speaking about.

I enjoy the healthy dose of chaos my Colorado life provides me.