The author of this essay is the first winner and recipient of the Arnold Rosen Life Experience Fellowship. This is an annual life-time award that funds the recipient’s work while in the retirement phase of life. The recipient’s only obligation as winner is to self-publish on Substack any item, story, essay, or memoir that the recipient thinks is worth saving and sharing.
Is it my imagination or has cellophane become exceptionally strong in the past 20 to 30 years! When I was a young man, if I bought candy or gum, (or way back then, a pack of cigarettes), I didn’t have to hunt for the little pull device that was designed to help you take off the cellophane. (It was like a separate cellophane string or ribbon, sometimes a different color. Did it have a formal name?) Back then, you didn’t need it, the thingy, whatever its name; you could simply just rip off the cellophane. It wasn’t difficult to start, and once started, it easily ripped off. Whoosh.
But in the last 20-30 years, I began to notice that I could no longer rip off the cellophane. Unfortunately, this period also coincided with a gradual awareness that I was getting older. I wondered: was my cellophane issue only an effect of getting older? Was I different or had I changed, or had there been some change in how candy is packaged? Was I becoming weaker and less coordinated, such that even my ability to unwrap candy was affected?
I decided to try and answer this question by using the Internet. Retirement has allowed me the time and the resources to invest in learning to ‘play’ the computer. I think of the computer as a musical instrument, like a piano or guitar. I sometimes find that reading about an application can occasionally give me a helpful overview, and even video tutorials (like those found on YouTube) can now and then be worth watching. But what really helps in mastering a particularly useful computer activity, (i.e., an application), is simply practice, practice, practice. Who has ever learned to play the piano by reading the manual or sight reading a musical score? Like swimming or riding a bicycle, there seems to be a muscle memory component involved in becoming computer proficient. In any event, I had become much more skillful in my Google searches, so I was up for the cellophane challenge.
My iPhone has Siri, and Siri is connected to the Internet, so at first I simply asked, “Hey Siri, has cellophane gotten stronger in the last 20 to 30 years?” Siri does better with factoids, like the number of feet in a mile, so I received no direct answer. Siri just suggested I look into 3 websites she displayed, but they were too broad to be useful and none was really relevant.
So I left my iPhone and went to my desktop, determined to answer this most pressing cellophane question. Bringing up my Google search page on my desktop brings up new dangers. Anyone who searches the Internet using a portal like Google is liable to fall into a ‘rabbit hole’. I recognized my own vulnerability over 5 years ago when I read an article by Kathryn Schulz, entitled “The Rabbit-Hole Rabbit Hole”. It came out in the June 4, 2015, issue of the New Yorker:
How did “rabbit hole,” which started its figurative life as a conduit to a fantastical land [Alice's Adventures in Wonderland], evolve into a metaphor for extreme distraction? One obvious culprit is the Internet, which has altered to an indescribable degree the ways that we distract ourselves. Twenty years ago, you could browse for hours in a library or museum, spend Saturday night at the movies and Sunday at the mall, kill an afternoon at the local video arcade or an evening at its X-rated analogue—but you couldn’t do those things every day, let alone all day and night. Moreover, content-wise, you couldn’t leapfrog very far or very fast from wherever you started, and there was a limit to the depth and nichiness of what you were likely to find; back then, we had not yet paved the road between, say, Dorothy Hamill and a comprehensive list of Beaux-Arts structures in Manhattan, nor archived for the convenience of humankind ten thousand photographs of fingernail art. Then came the Internet, which operates twenty-four hours a day, boasts a trillion-plus pages, and breeds rabbit holes the way rabbits breed rabbits.
The thrust of Kathryn Schulz’s New Yorker article is that the Internet threatens to be a monumental method of wasting time. In looking for even specific information, the apparent misdirection and messiness of the Internet requires you to examine one search ‘hit’ after another. The danger is that once a particular hit piques your interest, you will latch onto it and follow your new interest out of one rabbit hole and down into another. You end up aimlessly wool-gathering and passing time on the computer as wastefully as I can easily manage by playing Solitaire on my iPhone.
You need self-discipline to avoid the rabbit holes, but you also need judgement. The best Internet search is apt to turn up hits that are patently wrong, or more commonly, simply garbage. Sometimes you open your net and find a valuable mollusk in all the debris, but often you feel that your net is dredging the nearest landfill rather than the ocean’s richness. Every ‘hit’ is merely a ‘hint towards the truth’. It may lead you towards something true, but it is just as likely to lead you away and astray.
After an hour or so of exhaustively searching the Internet, evaluating each hint and lead, keeping some, rejecting most, and summing up their proper weights towards a solution, I finally arrive at an answer that satisfies me. Here it is:
From a web site used to market wrapping materials to manufacturers, I find, “Things have come a long way since the invention of cellophane…In actual fact, our products are made of Biaxially Oriented Polypropylene, or ‘BOPP’ for short.” I discover that the new wrapping materials are: food grade safe; tasteless and odor free; waterproof and airtight; clear, and ideal for “stamp collectors looking to protect their valuable collections”. I read, “Our cello bags are crystal clear and never lose their glossy look. BOPP is also a far stronger material [my italics] than the old fashioned Cellophane.” I find the following quote, (in some unnamed rabbit hole or another), posted no earlier then 1993: “BOPP films are used in food packaging and are replacing cellophane in applications such as snack and tobacco packaging due to favorable properties and low cost.”†
This proves it to my satisfaction. I have not been imagining that cellophane seems to be getting stronger. (The material we call ‘cellophane’, is no longer a protected trademark, but like ‘Kleenex’, because of its wide general use has lost its copyright.) The evidence is overwhelming that industry has changed over to ‘BOPP’ and similar wrapping materials — and they are stronger. Of course, like everything, my awareness of cellophane’s growing strength is probably due to some combination of cellophane’s new strength and my own growing weakness as my years accumulate. That’s just life.
So what’s the point? This essay probably qualifies as a ‘rabbit hole’ by itself. My mother-in-law, (of very fond memory), never hesitated to speak her mind. She would label this essay shtuss, a Yiddish word which I first heard from her lips, and which from the context alone I knew its meaning without the need for a formal definition. It means ‘silly and stupid,’ to be avoided. So, reader, if you have read this far and enjoyed the essay, and think that something like this is worth reading, then let me know. Otherwise keep quiet. My mother-in-law would not want to see shtuss encouraged.
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†By the way, while searching the Internet, I never ran across a formal name for that thingy used to open my gum and cigarette packages. However, I did find a website put up by a wrappings manufacturer that invited email inquiries. On 8/29/2021, I asked by email whether there was a formal or technical name for the pull string thingy. By 9/18/2021, after I had fully completed this essay for Substack, I still had not received a response.