Chopsticks, known for being utensils, famous for being East Asian. Nobody thinks much about them, so a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt. I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie! Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of chopsticks? Well, Alex, I have about a hundred of them.

So I love, I love...

Is it for your 50 hands?

Is that what you're doing?

Yes, I am a nautilus, a nautiloid, and I have many, many arms.

Yeah.

I love the foods that generally you eat with chopsticks.

And I know how to use chopsticks and I happily use them, but I do not like the mouth feel of the takeout chopsticks.

And take out like the disposable wooden snap apart.

Yes, yeah, because like the nice chopsticks or the wood that has been, you know, like polished so that it's like smooth type thing.

They're great, they're nice.

Yeah.

Specifically the cheap takeout chopsticks, it like kind of rubs against my teeth in my mouth in a way that I don't love. Yeah. Specifically, the cheap takeout chopsticks, it like kind of rubs against my teeth in my mouth

in a way that I don't love.

Whenever I have an option to say, like, don't put any chopsticks in because I don't

want to waste stuff, I do that, but often you don't get that option.

So I have been collecting the cheap chopsticks thinking that maybe I'll use them for something at some point.

We have a box of all sorts of disposable takeout stuff.

It's delusional.

I'm never, I don't know what I could possibly, like am I going to host a dinner party where I'm going to give everyone disposable chopsticks probably not like and here's that plastic fork that snaps in half immediately if you

try to use it um i don't know i still don't know what to do with my collection of the wooden

chopsticks uh that i did not ask for. And I don't know what to do with. There's like a community refrigerator in our town and we just kind of give batches of that stuff once in a while. Because it builds up and then we don't use it. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to look it up because that would be amazing. I have like, and I'm, you know, because I keep them all nice and tidy. Us too. They're so neat. Yeah, yeah. And just like, like, and here's, here are my hundreds of chopsticks that I don't use and I don't know what to do with, but I certainly don't want to throw them out because that's a waste. Right. I don't know. These are, it's a tool.

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