For most of my life, for example, I’ve kept butter in the fridge. It was just how it was done. This meant, of course, that the butter was always too hard to spread on anything, but again, that’s just how it was. For a while, we just didn’t get butter at all, replacing it with more processed but lower fat substitutes. But butter’s just better, particularly when it gets consumed in moderation. That, and butter is packaged in paper and cardboard, where other butterish yellow oil-based products are invariably in little plastic tubs.
Better taste and fewer nanoplastic particles clogging up our neurons seems a fair trade for slightly elevated cholesterol levels...which are apparently mostly genetic anyway.
So butter returned, but it was still hard to spread.
At some point, we started leaving butter out, a half-stick at a time. Butter left out is soft and perfectly spreadable, but needs to be covered if you don’t want it to quickly go rancid. We slapped a bowl over the plate where it sat on the counter, and that sufficed for a few months. It looked a little awkward, as most kludged solutions do. At some point it occurred to me...isn't there a word for an object designed to keep butter fresh? A dish for butter? Hmmm. What was that called again?
At some point, we started leaving butter out, a half-stick at a time. Butter left out is soft and perfectly spreadable, but needs to be covered if you don’t want it to quickly go rancid. We slapped a bowl over the plate where it sat on the counter, and that sufficed for a few months. It looked a little awkward, as most kludged solutions do. At some point it occurred to me...isn't there a word for an object designed to keep butter fresh? A dish for butter? Hmmm. What was that called again?
Which meant a purchase, and I prefer not to buy things, or add new items to the sprawling clutter of our house.
I mean, it was just a butter dish, but when you’re as cheap as I am, sometimes even a fifteen dollar purchase sometimes takes me a good running start. I looked at butter dishes. I hemmed and hawed. I looked again. Did we really need it? Was it really necessary? I'd think on it, then bail, then think on it, then abandon the latest online shopping cart, which would complain at me from the tabs as I left. "Wait! You meant to buy this!" it would cry, before I hit the little x and went back to considering the necessity of such a thing.
Sometimes that's helpful. How many times have I been tempted to buy a useless object, and chosen not to? Dozens. Drones and drone flutes, nifty little home robots and used Mercedes Benz convertibles, all dancing like visions of sugar plums in my ad addled head. In this internet age, as algorithmically optimized marketing tempts us to purchase our way to daily happiness every single time we go online, having a constitutional resistance to consumption is a useful adaptation.
It's not that I don't hear the siren song of mammon, and yearn to reach for it, but my nature binds me to inaction like Odysseus straining at the mast.
That said, a butter dish is just a butter dish.
“Dave, just buy a [expletive deleted] butter dish already,” said my long suffering wife after I brought it up to her for about the fourth time. She knows that sometimes even the littlest and most irrelevant changes don’t come easy as I grow more curmudgeonly in middle age.
Eventually, I found one that seemed both functional and pleasing, a ceramic butter dish shaped like a stick of butter. I bought it. It took a minute.
After a couple of months, it felt a little less like an impulse buy.
Just a little.
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