I thought my days of not being able to open things were truly behind me. I know all the tricks – run the jar under hot water, use a towel for better grippage, puncture the lid’s seal with a can opener. But yesterday a bottle of seltzer had me thinking I might never experience the joy of bubbles on my tongue again. Never mind that I had only just returned from the store across the street where the seltzer was procured or that my Fitbit would leap off of my wrist with joy if I made a second round trip. As the spot between my thumb and index finger reddened and little broken blood vessels started to pop up, I switched to scissors, jabbing them indiscriminately at the seam of the cap even as I thought to myself, “This is a bad idea.” Fortunately, they weren’t that sharp; unfortunately, the cap was somehow vacuum-sealed to the bottle in such a way that even fully separating it from the plastic ring at its bottom did nothing to make it turn more easily.

I knocked on my roommate’s door for reinforcements. While my legs are strong and capable (of carrying me across the street for replacement seltzer), my arms are weak and puny. I assumed that admission of said weakness would be the only toll required for admission into the land of the hydrated, but after donning rubber gloves and getting out all of our pliers, my roommate shrugged and said, “It’s really sealed on there!” He kindly noted that he had some seltzer in the fridge I could partake of (he also noted that they probably had surmountable bottles about 100 steps away from our apartment), but the desperation I had started to feel was not for seltzer but for conquest.

Recently, my small harp has developed a persistent and unbearable buzzing. It happens when I play the second-lowest E or D strings, but the actual buzz is located somewhere in the upper registers – it migrates. I’ve checked every eyelet, every tuning peg, the bolts on the harp’s feet, any metal object at all, and cannot find a single loose bit that would cause the drone. It buzzes regardless of where I sit in the room. It buzzes no matter what key I’m playing in. It feels like a punishment straight out of The Tell Tale Heart, without the murdery bits! Turning the harp upside down to inspect its hollow innards (it’s made of carbon fiber) hasn’t yielded anything. Every time I play, I’m reminded of my failure to fix this assault on my ears.

So the seltzer took on a heightened importance.

I’ve seen the videos of people “sabering” their bottles of champagne and briefly considered whether that might work on plastic, but I figured if I was going to do something ill-advised it should at least be with a reasonably blunt object. And a wine corker is…not blunt, but at least able to be used at a ninety degree angle instead of adjacent to one’s fingers. I wished I could have embedded the corkscrew into the cap and butterflied it off, but I settled for poking it hard, at which point seltzer began to spray all over the counter and me. “Calm down, calm down,” I muttered at it soothingly, because that’s how seltzer likes to be addressed. Once it had stopped panicking, I turned it upside down and milked it like a cow.

And that took about ten minutes, but it felt like triumph enough. Now if I could only figure out what isn’t bolted down properly on my tell-tale harp.

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