Canteens

10 September 2010

Hydration is all the rage on college campuses these days. But nobody who is anybody is caught with a disposable water bottle-- to drink Aquafina is to openly admit that you hate whales, penguins, panda bears, unicorns, and all the other endangered species of earth. The ecologically responsible thing to do is to carry a plastic or metal water bottle (a canteen to generations past) and refill it however many times per day you intend on visiting the W.C.

Now, this refilling business is a rather novel idea for many of today's college generation. Other than getting a refill of Mountain Dew at Taco Bell, today's collegiate has grown up with travel beverages largely marketed in disposable single-serving, single-use containers. To leave the house with a container with the intention of keeping up with it all day so that it might be washed (maybe) and reused tomorrow, is a difficult premise. I make this assumption because I have seen enough abandoned water bottles on campus to figure that it must be quite the daunting task to keep up with one, even though that annoying jingly carabineer on the cap clips it to pretty much anything in the world.

In effort to keep myself hydrated through the physically rigorous task of sitting and reading all day, and to show my kindest regards to the dolphins, I recently bought a small metal canteen bottle. It should be noted that I chose metal over plastic because consuming foods from plastics might be slowly poisoning us with carcinogens, eventually leading to cancer. (It's a fancy time for that scientific research, as everything I have ever eaten has been in plastic at some point.)

I admit that Iwrite today not with the purpose of defending the use of disposable containers, but rather to make a confession: I am a Southerner. And as do many of my comrades, I suffer from a delightful obsession with sweet tea. It delights my taste buds with biscuits or with fried chicken, with rice or bean, with earthy venison or a simple sandwich. I like ooo-gobs (1) of sugar and a glass big enough to hold all the oily water in the Gulf. I drink so much of it that I worry it will somehow show up in a specimen or blood sample and my doctor will threaten to send me to sugar rehab if I don't stop. Needless to say, my sweet tea habit is an unhealthy one. It has become my ritual every morning to fill my canteen bottle to the brim with sweet tea, gulp down the first three inches of it, then again top off the bottle and screw on the cap.

I confess not only that I have an unhealthy habit, but that I have felt as if I am somehow cheating the fools who are actually have water in their water bottles. I enjoy my tea for the first few morning hours while they gargle down gulps of tepid water. I quietly feed the wiles and pleasures of my addiction while they monotonously hydrate all the day long.

Today for the first time I wondered if any others might be as bold and ingenious as myself by venturing to put something other than water in their water bottles too; I drink my glorious tea, and once, I knew of a lad who sipped coffee mingled with Irish whiskey from his tumbler every morning during Greek class. It is a curious incident that these conveniently opaque bottles have become such a craze among college students, isn't it? Eco-friendly, my hiney (2).

(1) 'ooo-gobs' is one of my mother's words, herein referred to as Glenna-isms, meaning "way more than there should be."
(2) 'hiney' - a Glenna-ism referring to one's hind quarters, as in "If I ever hear you talking during church again, I will take you to the bathroom and tan your hiney!!"