My perpetual fight with the mayonnaise jar or How it may have won the battle but not yet the war.

I'm quite possibly the only person in history to get in an actual fight with a jar of anything and lose, but that's later.

First I want to address my remonstrance with the mayonnaise jar:

Why is it whenever I want a turkey sandwich I can never get the damn jar of mayonnaise open? I'm beginning to think it really is a message from the Lord warning me against eventual arterial clogs. And reminding me of my limited caloric intake. I'm serious! I can never it get it open!

I've begun to formulate a series of postulations about how the temperature change between my fridge and the outside air is causing a negative pressure differential. This would in turn create a vacuum in the mayonnaise jar. I've seriously looked it up, but not in a book or anything. On wikipedia. The part about the air pressure differential and temperature, not the mayonnaise jar part.

I've also wondered if maybe I have a rare degenerative muscle disease that prevents me from opening it. Pondering this reminded me to take my vitamins.

Now for a short story of how the mayonnaise jar won our fight:

Imagine an evening in which your humble narrator and protagonist has had a bad day. Go ahead...I'll wait. Not a horrible day, I survived and all, just a bad day.

Okay, now that you're finished I won't bore you with the details of the day because in reality I had probably over-reacted. So bad day turns into bad evening. I'm sure traffic was stupid on I-40 and I'm also confident I had to be somewhere that I was already late for. All I really want is a God-Blessed turkey sandwich. With mayo. Not unreasonable.

My first mistake was in assuming my foe wasn't formidable. I was lulled by the availability of resources. I had bread, turkey, even fake cheese. I had clean utensils. Hell, I even had papertowels. I was already crafting my victory speech. I was already tasting the sweetness of the turkey and mayo combined with the white bread.

Oh no! The mayo won't open. I try again. And again and again and again ad nauseum. I whack on the lid with a knife. I beat the lid against the counter. I grab a dishtowel to get some grip. It's not opening. My mother calls and catches an undeserved wrath by suggesting that I run the lid under hot water. (It didn't work by the way.) I should have admitted defeat. I should have had something different. But I'm not one to shy away from danger. I'm not a chump. I'm not a wuss. I can out-think the jar of mayonnaise because I am smarter than it. And I have been blessed with the gift of opposable thumbs. These thumbs separated my species from our lowly common ape-like ancestors and brought us off the harsh ground niche into the canopy where we feasted like kings on the ripe fruits and berries available there. Had I been around I would have scoffed at those still lumbering on the ground waiting for the offal and cast-offs of my petit-dejuener. I can get the mayonnaise jar open. I merely have to be smarter.

Plastic is a wonderful thing. It has certainly been a useful invention derived from our limited fossil fuels But, it does break. If you slam a mayonnaise jar against the floor hard enough not only does the lid break but the actual dense plastic jar does too.

And what I hadn't looked up on the wikipedia beforehand was the physics of momentum. This being that whenever an object collides with another non-movable stationary object the contents of the first object escape at the velocity with which they were impacted against the non-movable object.

You would be amazed at how fast you can hurl a mayonnaise jar.

You would also be amazed at how well mustard compliments turkey.