I want a short, productive life. Unlike the humans who use me and benefit from my immense talents, I am not interested in a long life. My two goals are to be used for cleaning and to disappear from the earth. I fulfill my purpose and my reason for existence by serving selflessly, holistically, comprehensively, and steadfastly through absolute and total commitment to destruction of me. I am a bar of soap and proud of it.
I was created by mixing sodium salts of fatty acids which were derived from fats and reacting them with an alkali in a process known as saponification. The fats are hydrolyzed by the base, yielding glycerol and crude soap. Refinement and a careful blend of oils give me the basic properties that result in who I am--a bar of soap!I like my life the way it is and enjoy making a difference.
But my heart always breaks over the two potentially awful things that can happen to me. One is to be ignored at the store and not be purchased. For to be ignored is to not be used. And not to be used breaks the code of soapdom. But almost as bad is to be purchased, used once, and then waste away in water day after day forgotten and never effected.
Yet when used regularly my purpose is so fulfilling. I make people clean and happy. But I have been threatened lately by so many new products on the shelf. Seems as though every time I turn around there is a new liquid product with a fancy name and an unusual color. But I suspicion that regardless of the latest cleansing agent that hits the market with a bang, ultimately people will prefer the tried and true--a good old fashioned bar of soap.
As I live out my brief but important life, I greatly anticipate my own demise and know that I serve a higher purpose--the sanitizing and destruction of dirt and germs. I strongly recommend to the readers that they contact my siblings and relatives for all of us want to be used, to dematerialize, to dissolve, to evaporate, to expire, to fade, to pass, to perish, and to dissipate. And now I must wax less and wane more.
4 comments:
But does the soap know the joy of bubbles? Does not simply living out of a sense of vocation cause a potential existential crisis? In other words, "will the soap ever contemplate an existence beyond its own soapiness?" This would seem to be sadness in this exercise.
Is this a call for certain music majors to finally shower.
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oops. wrong punctuation.
The soap fulfills part of the process. Soap by itself can only lie there. It has no mission without some undesirable residue to be removed. And to be productive it needs water and the motion to create a lather. Soap is only part of life. I am not glorifying the dirt but remember that the experiences that find the dirt influence who we are.
MS
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