For Those Who Schlep

A commute-changing recommendation

Feb 10, 2025

One January in maybe my sophomore year of adulthood, I made a resolution: buy a water bottle (and, I guess, drink water from it — although that wasn’t actually part of the resolution).

That year, my roommate and I put our resolutions on the fridge. When her little sister came to visit us later that month, she stared at the lists and then (very correctly) pointed out that a resolution is not a resolution if you have to buy it.

But still! Ever since that fateful January commitment, I have lugged my water bottle everywhere. At some point along the way, it became just as much a security blanket as it is a hydration station.

My water bottle of choice has cycled through many different eras. There was the Time of Hydroflask — a long period consisting of orange, white, gold, big, and small bottles. In the pandemic times, when we weren’t really leaving the house, I became partial to the classic Tervis (somewhere between a glass and a bottle). When I was building my first shop, my friend gifted me a delightful Bink in the perfect shade of Big Night Red. Then I moved onto Owala, where I have happily been sipping for the last couple of years. (I have not yet succumbed to a Stanley Cup.)

A couple of weeks ago, my Owala met its inevitable end: I accidentally left it behind in a hotel room. And so, it was time to take stock and consider my options.

I loved the pop colors and ergonomic spout of that bottle, but I had come to resent its heavy weight. When full, it’s at least three pounds1! I am undoubtedly giving my future self some horrific back/neck/shoulder problems, thanks to the bag I haul around the city that contains my entire life — laptop, notebook, pouch of necessities (which are not actually necessities), gym clothes, tennis shoes, shower at the gym stuff, makeup, scarf/gloves, wallet, keys, and the list goes on. My back simply cannot afford to add a 3-pound water bottle to that list anymore.

And so. I needed a water bottle For Those Who Schlep. Something easy, breezy, light and airy. Something that doesn’t scream WATER BOTTLE every time you whip it out. Something that keeps a low profile, but makes you want to take a sip every time you look at it. And I found just that:

16 ounces of hydrated, butter-yellow bliss

I hadn’t seriously considered Nalgene since my high school lifeguarding days. The original design has that gaping huge opening…does anyone look cute drinking out of that??? I certainly don’t.

But my new Nalgene has a much improved narrow spout, to go along with its perfectly petite size. It comes a range in actually gorgeous colors, like this one, Butter (I’m also so tempted to get Marmalade). It has a very friendly price point. Most importantly, it is LIGHT. My life-containing bag is still way too heavy, but it’s no longer my water bottle’s fault.

I’m only a couple weeks in, but I am thrilled about this new era of hydration for me. And if you too are a Person Who Schleps, I suggest you give it a whirl.

3 MORE LITTLE GEMS:

My Gap-is-back campaign continues. As I’ve said before, I truly believe these are the best sweatpants you can buy, and now may I present: my new sleep short obsession. Light, airy, soft as can be. I size up.
Book Toggling. I am a tunnel-vision reader — I tend to look for novels that engross me so deeply that there is no way I can put them down, let alone start reading something else in parallel. But recently, I was inspired to pick up the Empresses of Seventh Avenue, a nonfiction chronicle of the beginnings of the modern American fashion industry. Toggling between that, and an intense, gripping, kinda scary novel (God of the Woods), is a revelation. If I need to wind down and actually go to bed, the nonfiction book is ideal. If it’s a Saturday afternoon and I want to get off screens and do something else with my brain, that novel is waiting to pull me in. This is such an obvious reading strategy, I realize now that I am writing it down, and I hope you are smarter than me to have discovered it sooner.
Father Figure by George Michael, stuck in my head since seeing Babygirl. This song is so good.