“We encounter microplastics everywhere: from trash, dust, fabrics, cosmetics, cleaning products, rain, seafood, produce, table salt, and more.”—Harvard Medicine.

"微塑料无处不在：垃圾、灰尘、织物、化妆品、清洁用品、雨水、海鲜、农产品、食盐……我们生活的每个角落都能发现它们的踪迹。"——《哈佛医学》

In your breath: You’re puffing out microplastics like an angry dragon, if dragons exhaled particles of old car tires with their discontented sighs.

In your pockets: You might be prone to forgetting your keys, but you’re always packing those miccy-ps.

In your homemade vegan chili: Even if you grow the tomatoes yourself and buy your beans at the local, no-waste, refill-your-own-mason-jar smug-mart, microplastics will still find their way into this dish. Some say it’s because they’re everywhere; others argue that there’s a reason vegan cheese tastes like polypropylene.

In your heart: Not to worry—this one’s just a metaphor.

In your heart: Sorry, this one’s worryingly literal.

In your thoughts and prayers: Much like microplastics, these serve little to no practical use.

Incognito mode: They’re worried about being overexposed this early in their careers and so decided to do an anonymous temperature check/Google search to gauge how they’re being perceived by the gen-pop.

In a funk: They couldn’t help but notice that the over-all vibe of the online chatter was negative. In fact, they were deeply shocked by one particular article, which seemed to imply that microplastics being deep inside the very structure of human bones was a bad thing.

In disbelief: Their online deep dive also revealed that somehow not a single person was impressed by them reaching the summit of Mt. Everest, or thought to congratulate them?

Incommunicado: The Mt. Everest thing really got to them, so they’ve gone off grid for a while. (Don’t worry—they remain physically in your bones, but emotionally they’ve checked out.)

In third spaces: The cost-of-living crisis, social media, and the pandemic are often cited as reasons for the decline in accessible third spaces. In truth, microplastics are crowding your local library while they work through some stuff by reading Mel Robbins’s seminal self-help book “The Let Them Theory.”

In touch with their feelings: They’ve processed the fact that humans are a hateful and bitter species, and they’ve done so in a healthy and pragmatic way. O.K., people are hating on microplastics for getting off their asses and going to Antarctica rather than just talking about it. Let them!

In touch with your mom: They’re very grateful for what she’s done for the microplastic community by misplacing her latest reusable water bottle on a biweekly basis.

In your eternal soul: You might scoff at this one, but you’d do well to remember a time, not so long ago, when the very idea of nanoplastics being in your literal bones seemed completely implausible. Which might lead you to realize that you shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss something just because it seems far-fetched.

In the DNA of your unborn great-grandchildren: Congrats! ♦