Just One

At my parents' house, they have a chopstick that has been worn down a couple of inches. It lives near the coffee machine, and has become a fixture there. It's not quite worn down to the nub, but it's well on its way. Imagine a pencil that has been half-used, and you'll have a pretty good idea of what it looks like. It's just been worn down over time and through use.

Now, I've always found that one chopstick mildly interesting. I mean, I fully understand the physics that led to that, but it's sort of like seeing a rock that has been worn smooth by a running river. There's this moment of wonder where you contemplate the ravages of time, you know?

The other thing that always came to mind was a sense of wonder. I mean, clearly, my parents could see that this chopstick was getting the worse end of that interaction. Couldn't they have just switched to a different tool/implement? And why the coffee machine? That seems like a strange place for a chopstick. It's not like you would pick up coffee grounds with chopsticks, so why combine those two things? It's even more puzzling when you consider that it's only a single chopstick that serves this purpose. It's not a pair of chopsticks, it's a single, solitary chopstick. What gives?

Well, I think I have a pretty good idea now.

You see, I tend to mix in a fair bit of milk with my coffee every now (my brother calls this "coffee flavored milk"). And in order to make this drink, you have to stir the coffee and the milk together. In coffee shops, they have a special coffee stirrer tool for this. We don't live in a coffee shop, so I usually grab something out of the silverware tray to do this. My options are a teaspoon of some sort, or ... a chopstick.

I can't entirely explain why, but most of the time, I end up choosing the chopstick. It's just ... simpler. I think part of it is that we don't use chopsticks every meal, so the teaspoon is slightly more valuable to our day-to-day. If I'm going to have my near-daily Peanut Butter Snack, I'm most likely going to use a teaspoon. So if I'm going to "sacrifice" a utensil to substitute as a coffee stirrer, I'm going to pick the one with the lower day-to-day value.

The other thing worth mentioning is that it's much simpler to wash a chopstick. It takes like three seconds to do. With cutlery, we try to batch it up into loads for the dishwasher to do. So there's no guarantee that the teaspoon is going to be readily available again for a few hours. It's obviously not a deal-breaker, but I hate the notion of being one teaspoon short at a meal because the dishwasher isn't quite ready yet. I mean, I'll wash one by hand at that point, but that also seems to slightly detract from the value of the dishwasher.

Now, all of that makes sense in my head, but it wasn't until recently that it occurred to me that my parent's half-chopstick and my habits came from the same place. I think it was something like the hundredth time that I was using a chopstick to stir my coffee when I realized that if I kept stirring with chopsticks, I might wear one of them down through sheer friction.

The epiphany hit me very shortly thereafter, and I suddenly understood full-well why that worn-down chopstick is a thing for my parents. As the saying in Spanish goes, "mas sabe el Diablo por viejo que por Diablo." Roughly translated, that means that the Devil is more cunning for being old than for being the Devil.

It's a heck of a lesson to learn from a half a chopstick, let me tell you.