La Croix in a Fun Glass w/ a Fun Straw

I think it would be disingenuous of me to not acknowledge that anyone w/in my service radius is living in an atmosphere of constant advertisement. It's on our screens - of every size - & it's on our buildings, our billboards, our clothing, our mail, & plenty of our other belongings have logos & trademarked phrases scrawled across them. I don't blame myself or blame you for accumulating things. But I think a wonderful way to restore the power rested from you by the constant coercion to buy new things is to set up roles & rules for what you already have.

I like assigning roles & rules to my belongings w/ mnemonic devices & trying to gamify spaces. The repetition of these devices & games really allows your relationship w/ your stuff to come full circle. These are what I believe the stages of ownership are:

1. Ooh! I want that! It will help me accomplish X or help me feel Y.

2. Wow, now that I have it, I remember that managing it is labor - like clothes needing to be folded, dishes needing to be cleaned, toolboxes needing to be sorted, et cetera.

3. Step 3 is a fork in the road. You can either

A: Lose the willpower to manage the object & then, potentially, lose the object, whether by donating it, throwing it away, or burying it amongst your other belongings. Or

B: Recapture some of that excitement for step 1 by learning how to remember that your stuff has a job it would be happy to do for you, if you would just let it.

My most-recent example in my home is the blog title: La Croix in a fun glass w/ a fun straw.

About 8 months ago I started time-restricted eating. I typically fast from 8 PM @ night until noon the next day, just racking up teas, varieties of water, & black coffee in the interim so that I can be better-hydrated. It helps the autophagy in my brain so that I stay clear-minded. The hardest thing to give up after 8 PM though has been a beer or a cocktail w/ my husband. For years we had a distinct pattern where we ate dinner together when he arrived home - often after 9 PM - then turned the television on & drank alcohol before going to sleep. It's not uncommon for many couples to do almost exactly that. But I did read Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker in 2023 & I knew based on his research that alcohol before bed was not going to help me get restful sleep.

Shortly before I started this fasting, we purchased our 1st house together & started building baskets of donations for items that we couldn't give purpose to in our new home. Drinking glasses that had lost their mates were 1st on the chopping block. But y'all. Some of these partnerless glasses were my favorites. They were so weird, so me, or so Victor. @ 1st, we put them aside in our pantry, letting them fall into disuse - which was still unpleasant for me. So we put them downstairs on our dry bar instead, but since I was cutting out most of my evening drinks, they were still not being allowed to do their job.

Enter the 3 appointments I had w/ a dietitian in early 2025. She suggested I replace late-night beer w/ La Croix. That was not novel. That was not advice I desperately needed & could not think of myself. But she did use the phrase, "Ask him to pour it into a glass for you - that way you still get to have a fun drink!" & it clicked. A "fun" drink. A fun drink. How could I make something calorie-free & nonalcoholic even remotely fun, when I naturally think that it is calories & alcohol that constitute fun?

The answer was in all of those mismatched glasses &, for added joy, the countless crazy straws & metal straws I have accumulated over the years by attending birthday parties or navigating the paper-straw craze when it dominated retail spaces.

Today, Victor's & my favorite brewery, TRVE, is closing. They opened a new location in Asheville, North Carolina, in March of 2024, & climate disasters wiped out that location so decisively that it is taking the South Broadway location in Denver down w/ it. & while I will miss that taproom forever, I still have this glass, even if all I ever drink from it is La Croix. This glass & all these silly straws have a place in my home, same as my gym tees, my books, & Michael Jordan (seen here bartending for us @ the dry bar downstairs).