Partly Cloudy, 64°
Every morning when I wake up to the sweet sounds of public radio on my vintage alarm clock, the first thing I do is reach for my some water so that Mother Nature is coursing through my veins even before I leave my bed. Some reach for coffee mugs hastily filled the night before; others have an aluminum bottle. I, however, have a jam jar.
I know what you're thinking. "With a name like Smucker's it has to be good." And it would be, if I ate that over-processed nonsense they try to market as jam. But since I only buy organic jam, mine has to be great. And let me assure you that it is.
You see, I leave the jar - without its lid, of course - on a windowsill bathed in sunlight for an entire day. When I screw the lid on 24 hours later, I've literally captured sunshine. And when I put my water in, it becomes liquid sunshine. Call me crazy, but I think it's beautiful to get so much energy directly from the sun. I've cut out all the middlemen - including fruits, vegetables, and, even worse, animals - so I feel good about that. And, of course, there's the whole recycling aspect of using a jar. I have the uncanny ability to simultaneously be green and be innovative enough to assign a new function to an old form.
But what I feel best about is taking my jam jar out of my carefully distressed leather backpack in class. With the sunshine inside, it naturally reflects more brilliantly than anything else in the room, and for some reason jam jar water is more invigorating than anything else during a boring 80-minute lecture. I can also coordinate the color of the jam jar top with the color of my Moleskine notebook, which is something you just can't do with a regular water bottle.
Believe it or not, drinking out of jam jars is also more sophisticated than drinking out of water bottles. Whereas you sit there during a lecture on post-structural signifiers sloppily suckling on a water bottle like a newborn babe, I coolly and calculatedly unscrew my jam jar and sip with the same refinement as Elizabeth the Second.
Refreshing as a Rocky Mountain spring in April, and refined as the Queen of England herself. And all this from a simple jam jar (marmalade ones work too). So be a dear for Mother Earth and drink from a jar.
