It was silly of me to think that I could reread Infinite Jest this summer, continue to avoid plastic and animal products and post regularly about it. It wasn’t just an issue of time: I knew that my attempts at writing about anything would seem too insignificant to bother once I was immersed in the brilliance of David Foster Wallace’s prose. I hung on though, for a while, at the very least posting my plastic trash results (albeit a little later every week, so that by the end I was almost a month behind) in bare-bones list form.
And although I stopped posting, I continued collecting all my plastic until about two weeks ago.
And then came Baby (as we unimaginatively called her, having run out of good names on about the eleventh stray kitten to show up in our yard.)[1] She appeared out of nowhere, with no discernable litter mates, disheveled and sluggish and obviously sick. And so I cleared everything out of my room that could harbor the fleas Baby most certainly had (including my dresser drawers full of clothes and my futon) and it became Baby’s room.
The first pieces of plastic I threw out without recording were the latex gloves I used to give Baby her medicine (we didn’t want what the vet thought at first was feline leukemia to spread to our cats.) It seemed counterproductive to leave them lying around, and besides, why should I include them in my tally when they were a product of my attempt to do a selfless thing?
When I was cooking the next day, it occurred to me I no longer had anywhere to pile my plastic trash.[2] So I left a piece of produce tape on the counter, till I could figure out where to put it, and it got thrown out by one of my roommates.
And then I kinda gave up. I still wasn’t buying any unnecessary plastic, but I was no longer collecting it.
Socializing a kitten takes work, and I was spending more time than I would care to admit cajoling Baby into eating and worrying about finding a home for her. “We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe,” Hal reflects during his breakdown on page 900 of Infinite Jest. Which was the only reason I wasn’t concerned about all the time (and money) I was spending on what was just one of thousands of stray kittens in Oakland. All human pursuits are basically irrational, is one of the themes that comes up again and again in Infinite Jest, but try living without devoting yourself to anything.
This line of thinking is the reason I still don’t have my room back. Baby got better, became a glutton for human affection, and was adopted. So we promptly rescued two more kittens.
And then I had two serious lapses. The first occurred when we ordered take-out Chinese food because I was too busy with[3] the kittens one night to make dinner, and not only did my mu shu turn out to have egg in it, [4] but it came in a styrofoam container. I didn’t know anyone even used styrofoam take-out boxes anymore. Since it was Chinese, I had assumed the food would come in compostable paper containers. The second lapse happened the very next day, when I was driving with my friends to a wedding. We stopped in a tiny town and got food from the only restaurant we could find that would be able to make anything vegan: a taqueria. So the leftovers of a huge burrito wouldn’t be sitting in a hot car for the rest of the day, I just got a taco. I thought it would come in aluminum foil; it came in styrofoam, and when I bit into it, it tasted like… animal.[5] I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that my taco might come with refried beans.
But two styrofoam containers, a serving of eggy vegetarian mu shu, and some probable lard in my beans will not succeed in doing what I have (barely) managed to keep eleven kittens and a 1,000 page masterpiece of American literature[6] from doing this summer. No matter how time-consuming, insignificant, and irrational it is, I am resolved to stay off plastic and animal products. And maybe it’s not such a bad thing that I’ve stopped keeping track: as Joelle points out near the end of Infinite Jest, it’s harder to stay in the air, clearing cars, if you’re counting them.
[1] Against our better judgment, we had started feeding the mother and three kittens we discovered in our backyard at the beginning of the summer.
[2] My roommates put up with enough already without me stashing tempeh wrappers and empty rice milk cartons in a corner of our kitchen.
[3] Or stressed out about, rather. One of them was crying incessantly, and heartbreakingly, at the window, because he could see his friends outside and missed them desperately. (Even though I know this kind of personification of animal behavior is a stretch, I just can’t stop myself from thinking this way…)
[4] Like, the kind of eggy stir-fried egg that would have grossed me out even when I ate eggs.
[5] Or what animal tastes like to vegetarians anyway: wrong.
[6] Or, my FBOAT (Favorite Book of All Time.)