IF you’ve been dropping by the chocolate aisle, surely you have seen those yellow M&M’s containers that have a Smiley on their lid. I have two of them, and I now use them as storage boxes for paper clips because they’re easy to open.
One day, isang araw, I noticed I tended to choose the paper-clip color that would match the document. Say, for the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR), it should be red—definitely not for love, but for, uh, my usual reaction to taxes: Where do broken hearts go? Do I know where I’m going to? Do I like the things that life is showing me? Basilio! Crispin! Whew.
For banks, it’s the blue paper clip since I see blue as a strong color.
For VP Leni’s fans, pink.
For the Aquinos’ loyalists who are stuck with the miracles of the 1986 People Power, yellow, of course.
Because of this conscious effort to be politically correct, the not-so-popular colors are left unused at the bottom of the container, thus, defeating my first-in-first-out practice for office supplies since I was now compelled by my abundance mentality to refill it with a new batch of paper clips. To prevent this from happening again, I don’t look at the paper clips anymore whenever I have to get one. I stare at the trees outside my window and try to “feel” the paper clip’s color. Once I’ve picked one, I’m always pleasantly surprised: Oh! Pink! Pink for the bank?
Good thing I don’t have to send documents to Malacanang. Because what if I’ve picked a yellow or pink paper clip, should I put it back into the container and try to “feel” another color? Preferably BBM’s favorite, red? But that’s for the BIR.
If I have hobbies—reading, writing, spring cleaning—I also have habits. Weird habits. Aside from that complicated relationship with paper clips, I simply cannot throw away an unused portion of a sheet of paper. I always have this urge to cut it out and put it in the storage box for scratch paper. If only I can show you that box, it has papers of all types, colors, sizes, and even flyers that happen to have a blank space at the back. Sales agents are happy when I happily accept their flyers, they think I’m interested in their product. Not.
Seminar and convention kits that have blank paper in them, hotel stationery, hotel notepads, unused notebook pages, old documents, etc.—they are all scratch paper.
Another weird habit—collecting champagne corks. They all look the same from afar. But look closely and you’ll see that I wrote a date on each cork, the exact date when that particular champagne helped the family celebrate.
There’s this body cream that I’m using now—a pasalubong from a friend—and I’m already planning on what to do with its container once it’s empty.
Recycling is not a weird habit, but sometimes I buy things based on their recycling potential. For example, upon seeing the M&M containers, I was already imagining what to store in them once they’re empty.
