earbuds in the new junk drawer

When I was growing up, the junk drawer in the kitchen was filled with ballpoint pens. Cheap clicky pens with advertising on them. U.S. government skillcraft pens that looked super cheap, but wrote beautifully. And a collection of those orange-yellow Bic pens without their caps. Naturally, there was a collection of caps that didn’t fit any of the pens.

None of them wrote. I know this because I often saw my mother with the telephone nestled into her shoulder while she warmed the tip of a dried up pen with one of my dad’s lighters. My mom had some skills — she often pulled the phone line taut to reach the drawer, so adding just a little more tension would have launched the phone back toward the wall — but it never happened. She managed to keep the caller entertained while holding the pen and paper in one hand, and flipping the cap off the lighter and getting it to ignite without setting fire to the paper or her eyebrows. Miraculously, she’d squeeze a little ink out of that dead pen.

Then she’d put it back in the junk drawer.

I’m convinced the 21st century version of dead ball point pens is the earbud. Or earbuds — I suppose they come as a pair. My junk drawer has a bunch of pairs — with gross metal facing that is rusting (or worse — is that…is that earwax? gross.)

I find buds everywhere. There are half a dozen on my desk, some neatly wound, others in a tangle, a couple still in their pretty little boxes, unused. Pristine.

None of them are the kind I like, and every last one of them will be used, begrudgingly, because the good ones I bought last year have gone missing. I was so annoyed I stopped listening to my podcasts.

I finally got tired of punishing myself. Now I just punish my ear canal with the cheap earbuds. They are everywhere. Especially in the junk drawer.

What’s in your junk drawer?