Look around you. The world is two big bowls pressed together with a cranberry vinaigrette salad in the middle. Your head is a bowl for the squishy computer we call the brain. Your hands are just flexi-bowls. Eyes? Bowls. Your heart is a bowl for the slippery blood which breaths emotion and heartburn into you. Bowls, even, are fashion (see below).

 

I don’t think we celebrate bowls nearly enough. I love bowls. I use them every day for several different purposes. Soup is the universal language. Sometimes I even eat yogurt out of a bowl. I’m allergic to apples but I suspect I’d be a huge fan of applesauce, a good friend of the bowl. I began to think: what might be the best way to honor the beauty, utility, and musicality of the bowl? I decided that if I wanted to truly praise the bowl, understand the bowl, be the bowl–then I must drink out of it for three days. Good things happen to people who do things for three days. Just think of that fine young man Jesus. Three days of doing the thing of being dead really did him good.

 

Day 1

I’m an Aquarius. Aquarius is a constellation in the sky, the bowl of the clouds and sometimes the moon. The Aquarius is a series of lines which is also a god, Ea, the god of carrying things. Specifically water. Specifically in a big bowl. The stars speak Latin, and therefore Aquarius means “water-bearer.”  Therefore I am especially equipped, cosmologically and astrologically, to carry liquid, in bowls.

DA RULEZ

During Peirce meals, drink any liquid out of a bowl. I set an arbitrary exception that I can drink water out of a water bottle because it’s tech week and hydration is my Love Language™. When outside of Peirce, any liquid can be consumed through any medium so long as there is a certain bowl energy to the affair.

Breakfast

There is no one who ever learned without making a mistake. I think I got that from a fortune cookie, the bowls of wisdom, once.

Imagine you are carrying a sleeping turtle who is also your grandmother. Imagine that your grandmother, Matilda, is also like a little bit on fire. Imagine you are trying to carry her to a shallow body of water without waking her or making the fire sway to scorch your very nice, freshly laundered Canada Goose.

Basically what I’m saying is carrying a hot bowl of coffee from the servery to New Side is hard and I am famous for my wobbly wrists. Breakfast was where I learned that if I take a cup from the servery to new side to pour INTO a bowl, that nothing is lost so long as my paper-mache chapped lips touch the bowl and not the cup.

Game changer.

GUESS

THAT

LIQUID !!!

yeah correct it’s coffee next

Lunch

Oh, hey. Didn’t see you there.

Juice is a tricky subject for me. I have sensitive teeth and the acidity in those sweet sweet fruit liquids can really be a doozy.

I wrote a poem about it.

ode to juice

O juice i want

i love all things wet and pulsing with pulp

but ow my enamel

it stings like love

have you ever seen the flowers

on a lemon tree

they’re pretty nice i guess

little yoda hands

with a firework of reproductive organs

in the center

flowers are like that

sometimes

I drank juice. The bowl allowed the juice to cover a wider surface area which at first was a strange sensation but really reduced the general uncomfyness. I have overcome my genetic code. Take that Darwin.

Dinner

I went to Chipotle and ate food out of a bowl does that count

 

Day 2

Breakfast

Some things in life are unchanging. There will always be beautiful celebrities. There will always be people who don’t eat pizza crusts. There will always be trees whose odd shape makes them endearing.

Something that does change though is the color of water with some tea in it. Wow. My friend took a video of tea steeping in a water bowl and it was mesmerizing and whatever the visual equivalent of ASMR is. She took it on Snapchat though and didn’t send it to me and didn’t save it at all so now all we have is the whisper of memory and some imagination.

EXHIBIT A:

EXHIBIT B:

[visual missing but like a bunch of swirling of a bag and the color of amber slowly yawning into view like mixing paint]

EXHIBIT C:

Lunch + Dinner

Sometimes you’re just feeling really dry like an old cactus and you just don’t drink anything for an extended period of time haha whoops. That was lunch AND dinner. Is that a threat to my journalistic integrity? Maybe. Will I apologize? Yes.

 

Day 3

Breakfast

Is anybody listening? It’s so cold and lonely in this strange world where all things are round and shallow. If you’re out there, send a straw. I’m begging you. The funner the straw the better. At least two loops. And blue. The color of adventure.

Lunch

THE END IS NEAR MY FRIENDS STOP   THE EARTH BECOMES A STRANGE SHADE OF WHITE STOP   OUR TIME IS LIMITED AND CIRCULAR STOP   WE MUST REPENT FOR ALL OUR SINS STOP   MAKE A SLOW TRANSITION TO DRINKING OUT OF BOWLS STOP   THE SPOON IS A GOOD STARTING PLACE STOP    AND GRADUALLY INCREASE THE DEPTH OF THE BASE STOP     YOUR SOUL CANNOT AFFORD TO STALL STOP     I LEARNED THIS FROM A PODCAST STOP

Dinner

A very kind and hospitable professor who I like only kinda barely know invited me (and the rest of the Senior Religious Studies majors shoutout to my squad) to her house for dinner. I made pasta. It was okay pasta. It tasted like cream cheese mostly with a wink of artichoke. Was I about to ask this woman with a Ph.D. and a beautiful home if I could drink fancy whiskey out of her fancy bowls made in Japan? Nope. There is this thing called power. I have none of it. I accepted an assignment to drink out of bowls for three days. I’m the Thrill’s little worm. And I love it.