I’m in that muddled middle ground of Plastic Awareness. I’m aware enough to be highly irritated at our generation of plastic for trivial purposes, and aware enough to steer clear of the most egregious examples, but I go through a ton of plastic anyway. I am Impure. I mean, for all the good I do, I might as well just skip the irritation part.

Because I’m just absorbing that splinter of irk whenever I see a perfectly good Tetra-Pak milk carton with a plastic screw cap jammed into it for no reason. Another splinter for the drinking straw I didn’t ask for. A bed of nails for Lunchables. It all festers. My heart sings in hardware stores with their bins of naked nails and screws, their tiny paper bags. Or in a bakery, with baskets of bread and a pair of tongs. There are things I won’t buy because of the packaging, and I still can’t get away from it.

Sometimes it ambushes you.

I just bought underpants online, even though I knew the nice stretchy fabric was petroleum-based. Cotton requires a huge amount of water and pesticides. All of it takes fossil fuel to deliver. What are you gonna do? My package of underpants thunked onto my porch in a pleasingly unadorned cardboard box. So far, so good.

And inside were fifteen pairs of underpants, each with the required paper tag anchored to the waistband with a teeny annoying plastic fastener. I anticipated that. I am pre-splintered for that. But each one also came with its own plastic clothes hanger. What the hell? Did I buy so many at once they thought I was opening up a boutique?

I don’t even like that in the stores. There you are in the Delicates Department with plastic winking at you from every corner. Is there a good reason you need to have individual pairs of underpants and bras hanging on the rails like they’re at a dry cleaner? I would totally patronize a store that had one example of each item thumbtacked to a tri-fold poster board like an eighth-grade science project, while underneath would be bins of loose underwear to paw through for size and color. Maybe a small stack of paper bags.

Bonus: I’d be the only one in the store. So, there you have it. The reason is marketing. And that’s not a good enough reason to choke an albatross.

I have stared at these hangers, and I can’t come up with one use for them, now that the kittens have gotten them all off the counter and out of their system. Surely no one actually hangs up their underpants, do they? Do they? My mom used to fold them in half and stack them neatly in the drawer. Socks were rolled into a ball. But heck. This was a woman who ironed sheets. I still pair my socks but not all the way into a ball, which would take an extra second. Basically, I have streamlined my mom’s routines into what I considered an adequate if untidy protocol. I smash my sheets onto a shelf like I’m stuffing a turkey. I throw my underpants in a drawer like the little anarchists they are. The closest I get to fixing the bed is tossing the topmost cover over and giving it a tug in the corner, and mostly that’s to discourage some of the spiders.

Murr’s Dandy Dotage Dainties will not be coming to the mall anytime soon. My hangers will land in the garbage can with the cat poop under a pall of remorse, and life will go on.