Leo DiCaprio Would Totally Not Approve

My badass friend A and I once let lettuce come between us. I threw out the dregs of a salad, you see, and she thought that was incredibly wasteful. She’s originally from Russia, so I guess she’s been raised to make every last bit count. I am originally from New Jersey, so I was raised to go to the mall and just buy more. My reasoning for the egregious salad toss, as I recall, was that I figured I would throw it out now rather than pitching an entire Tupperware container a few weeks later, since let’s be honest: I would let the lettuce sit in my fridge until it became too soupy and vile to even think about opening.

A year or two later, A and I were roommates, and under her tutelage, I started hating waste too. I’m not saying I don’t squander perfectly good food now, because sometimes I do. But at least now I have the decency to let it really bother me and I make a genuine effort to avoid it when I can. As a result, I involve the Canuck in things like leftover smorgasbord dinners (you can imagine how that goes over). And sometimes Muffin gets random dinners like half a meatball, a browning banana and a toasted bread butt.

It’s a good thing A lives in Pittsburgh, because if she thought I was bad with the lettuce, she’d be scandalized by Muffin. Although Muffin is an adventurous eater, she’s also two, so at times she will reject things just for shits and giggles. She’ll have one mouthful of yogurt, and then request applesauce. She’ll ask for milk and then demand water. She’ll say she wants a banana – without mentioning that what she wants it for is to squish between her fingers. Some nights I’m great at tricking her into eating what I want her to, other nights we have a big to-do about it, with much discussion about how not-nice wasting is. Other nights, I am too tired to struggle with her over it, and so I serve up options until she is satisfied. My trash can fills up with half-eaten dinners.

And it’s not just food. Every day – usually several times a day – she runs over to the stepstool and points to the sink. “Right there,” she commands. I groan, because what she wants is to “wash dishes,” which basically means standing at the sink with the water running for a good 20 minutes (which is longer than she'll do anything else). Oh, I’ve tried filling up the sink, setting the water pressure to just a dribble or redirecting her to bathtime. She is not fooled. I start to tell her no, but then I see the J. Crew catalog that just arrived in the mail, and calculate that with Muffin occupied I probably have just enough time to page through it and dogear the things I like.

Then this week, a serious violation. I was in the bathroom, doing what, uh, people do in the bathroom and having it all narrated by Muffin. The phone rang, so I quickly finished up and ran to get it. As I chatted with the Canuck for a minute or two, things got quiet. Too quiet. I returned to the bathroom to find half a box of tampons floating in the toilet bowl. At least they were the biodegradeable kind.