In the pages of Salon, where our progressive betters ruminate, Nicole Karlis ponders the latest fashionable anxiety. Specifically,

Stories of heartache, tears, stress and dehydration that people experienced after a forced separation from their water bottles.

Says Ms Karlis,

I have an irrational fear of the water bottle going missing, resulting in suddenly being thirsty and unable to access water. For the record, I did not start using a reusable water bottle until I moved to the Bay Area in 2013.

Perhaps this is one of those moments when the significance of a statement may not be fully appreciated by the person making it.

Carrying a water bottle with me everywhere I go has turned into… a form of security, one that I’ve become strangely attached to… I am not alone. Plenty of people in my orbit have expressed a similar concern — an unease, really — at the prospect of misplacing their reusable water bottle.

Now, now. We mustn’t rush to judgement.

For many, losing one’s water bottle will wreak havoc on their day, even their week.

I’m trying. I really am.

I sent out a query to the public to see if others felt what I am now calling “water-bottle separation anxiety.” I received over a dozen responses, suggesting that I may have tapped into a cultural phenomenon – one that relates as much to health and psychology as it does to our complicated personal relationship with natural resources.

What follows is a catalogue of unobvious woe and amateur dramatics. “Activist Manuela Barón” – whose area of activism is left fashionably unspecified – explains how her ancient, battered water bottle had become a “part of” her, and how the loss of it, at airport security, resulted in a swell of emotional activity:

“I cried as I went through the scanner and ran off to my gate; I didn’t realise it would be like saying goodbye to an old friend.”

At which point, it occurs to me I may be misusing the word explain.

Sex differences, #2,042. 

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Today’s word is elegance. || Today’s other word is barkour. || Yeah, okay, it’s pretty big, I guess. || Banana in orbit. || He does this better than you do. || And she does this quite well. || Don’t tell your mother. || Rotary mobile phone. || Whiskey decanter of note. || The Dutch Headwind Cycling Championships. || Win $2,000 at the Takhini Hot Springs Hair Freezing Contest. || Korean classic film archive. || Snake makeover. || “Mathematics operates with unearned privilege, just like whiteness.” || Scenes from the North. || How to confound face recognition. || The glamour of flight. || And finally, “The more leftwing you are, the more likely you are to have been diagnosed with a serious mental illness.”

The vast majority of people worldwide, as well as millions in the UK, do not have their needs met – let alone live lives of luxury from which air travel and weekly shopping sprees could be painlessly stripped out and replaced for example with dance lessons. 

Why, yes, I am reading the Guardian. How could you tell?

The paper’s leader writer, Susanna Rustin, is very much troubled by thoughts of impending catastrophe and is keen for your routine shopping – for groceries and maybe a pair of shoes – to be replaced, “painlessly,” with forms of “artistic expression and creativity.” Like dance lessons. It would, of course, be “a reordering of society.”

When so many of the pleasures that we take for granted in the west, and that are desired by billions of people who do not yet have them, are so carbon-intensive, it is surely incumbent upon us to think very hard about the things in which we take joy and meaning that are less demanding of energy and resources.

Because “dancing and singing could be part of the solution to the climate emergency.” It says so here.

If capitalists, politicians and scientists have so far not found the answers – and the global mass movement of people called for by Greta Thunberg and others is, despite recent progress, still proving elusive – could the creative arts possibly provide one means to break the impasse? If the climate emergency is seen as the consequence of a failure of imagination, then this would seem to make sense.

We will save the planet with our expertise in jive, quickstep and Viennese waltz.

this would seem to make sense.

Though presumably we may have to gyrate without shoes.

I thought we’d slide into the week gently with an open thread. Ever the gracious host, however, I’ll share some snippets for consideration.

First up, via Darleen, the intersectional woes of a hefty gay playwright who champions fatness as “political,” a feat of radicalism, while bemoaning the scarcity of sexual interest directed at his person, and while sharing snaps of himself sitting on the toilet, plus-sized pants around his knees.

We also have more scenes of Portland policing, in which The Unspanked can apparently menace with impunity.

Oh, and further to rumblings in the comments, Star Trek: Picard is still testing my patience with what feels like an interminable and badly-written prologue, with each episode being slightly less interesting than the one before.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.