Today I cracked the handle of a plastic measuring cup.
The bowl dated back to lnhammer‘s early graduate school days. The cup came to Tucson with me (as part of a set) from St. Louis. This means (based on a whole two data points here) that the life of hard, inflexible plastic is somewhere in the vicinity of 15-20 years.
Writers of post-apocalyptic fiction, take note.
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And now I’m picturing, in the Bones of Faerie universe, some adult who grew up before the war with Faerie and thinks she’s adapted pretty well to her changed world, hitting a point where suddenly all her old plastic is breaking–and finding herself crying over the shards of an old plastic bowl, because she knows she can never replace it, and because everyone used to talk about how plastic lasted forever. And she’d be telling herself how stupid she was to cry, too, because after all it was just a cheap plastic bowl she bought for a dollar or two in college, and why would anyone mourn over that, especially when she’d lost so much more during the war, and never before cried at all?
But when she was done crying she’d test the edges of the plastic shards, to see if any of them might make a useful weapon or tool, to see if she might yet get some use out of them before the plastic broke down entirely.