Daily Dose of English 163
The Junk Drawer
Daily Dose of English 163
Intermediate
Hey everyone. My name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about the junk drawer, which isn't an official thing that anybody has, but everybody has a junk drawer, I feel. It's a very important part of a house or a living quarters that you have a place just to throw stuff, just to put little things that you don't wanna get rid of yet, but like that you might need, but also you don't wanna see and you don't wanna think about and you probably also don't really need. So everybody kind of ends up having a little drawer or a box or something that just kind of fills up with crap. And I want to talk about that a little bit because maybe it's not a thing in other countries, but I know it's definitely a thing in the US. Pretty much everybody's house that I go to or I've seen has some kind of just stuff drawer. And that's where you just throw stuff. It's usually in the kitchen because that's where that's usually a central location in a house. And it's also where you have a lot of things going on, right? Food, cooking, you're in the kitchen every single day. And so it's a pretty easy thing to fill there. But also you might have one in your office or a workshop or any other place like that where somebody spends a lot of time and ends up coming in contact with a bunch of stuff. Junk drawers are also very useful in many ways, right? It is useful to have a spot to put just stuff that you might need, like magnets or rubber bands are great, push pins, little things like that that are useful, but only every once in a while. And so you always have a spot to find them. I don't really have a junk drawer in my kitchen right now. I kind of have a spot in a drawer for bags and stuff where I keep kind of smaller random things like a pen or some tape and some rubber bands, like I said. But we definitely had a more junky drawer growing up in the kitchen where there was always just stuff like scissors and string and pieces of paper and pencils and pens and all those things. I think now, I haven't been in my parents' house in a while, but it's more organized now for sure. There's a drawer with mostly kitchen things. I wouldn't call it a junk drawer necessarily. There's definitely a bunch of random kitchen things in that one drawer, but then they each have their own sort of crap drawer where you just kind of throw extra stuff. Although I think they're both pretty good about cleaning it out. I, however, definitely have a junk, probably a couple of drawers, honestly. But actually, let me grab that right now. I'm gonna pause the recording. And now I'm back with my junk drawer on my lap. And so it's at a bit of an awkward angle. So let me see if I can make this a little, yeah, that's better. So now I can talk into the microphone and look into the drawer. It's not full of that much stuff. I thought there was more in here. But I thought it might be sort of fun to go through these and talk about what they are. So the first thing coming out is... What the hell is this? Oh, this is a little booklet that somebody made for me. It's made of paper. That's kind of cute, actually. I don't know what I'd use it for. Maybe I should put it out. That's kind of a nice drawing. That's sort of fun. All right. Well, that's something fun I found in my drawer. Item number one, a little handmade journal notebook thingy. Item number two out of my junk drawer is a bag of masks from, I think when I had COVID last, I got some masks and I still have the bag. Oh, and I keep some in my backpack because one thing I learned during the pandemic and wearing a mask is that it's helpful to have them if you need to go into like a public bathroom that stinks really bad. They're really helpful or if you, or sometimes if you're just cold. I have put one on when I was, my face was cold in the winter. Although that is not a huge problem in Mexico, but they actually are a slightly more useful than I thought. um like in every day right in the sense of of just random uses uh they're not just for um health public health or whatever and so um i think it's actually useful to have some of those just in case right plus what if something happens again I've also got a whole bunch of these ceiling hooks that I bought, because I wanted to hang up some sound panels in my office, but I never got the actual sound panels, so I have this stuff to hang them up, but I never got them. So that's a bunch of crap. Here I have a band, it's not a rubber band, but it goes around your... your ankle when you're biking, and it holds your pant leg close to your leg so that it doesn't get caught in the gears. Very niche thing. I don't know why this is in here. They're useful if you bike a lot, but I don't know where this came from or why I have it in here, but I have used this before. It's useful for biking, but I don't own a bike here, and the share bikes have guards for that already, so you don't need it. That's another thing. I've also got some fishing line. Just a useful thing to have around. Sort of very clear, thin string for tying stuff together basically. I've got some wrapping paper. If you ever have a present you need to wrap, right? It's nice to have just a scrap of paper around. So I've got some wrapping paper. I've also got some, oh, somebody got me as a gift some Sudoku and, oh, what are these called? They're called crosswords. Some crosswords. and Sudoku. Although, random tangent, crosswords in Spanish are worse. Because the words end up being so much shorter in the crossgram, that's not the right thing. Crossword is what we call them. But in English, they're much bigger and more interlapping, I guess, they overlap more. But in Spanish, it's really common to have just two-letter words that have only one answer. There's so many clues that are really, really easy and are completely self-contained. So I'm looking at this one here, and down in the bottom corner, there is two clues that are, they're not connected to anything, just those two together. And it's a three-letter word and a two-letter word. Um, and uh, And like you, it's, it, they're simple. It's like abbreviation of the word company and the Institute of National, uh, the, the, or the National Institute of, um, whatever this study is. And that like, it's just going to be I N O, which isn't like, it just giving you the answer. Like they're just not as good. Um, there, which is a little too bad. Cause I do like crosswords. I think they're interesting. Um, and I wanted to do them in Spanish, but they, there's a very different level of crossword artisanness, I guess. So like, yeah, like here's another one. 35 down in this random one that I turned to, it's not connected to anything. It's not crossed with any other words. And the clue is or in English, which would be or, right? Because it's in Spanish. Like that's the entire thing. That's an entire section of the puzzle, which to me is just bad puzzle design. Anyway, I'm getting distracted. My junk drawer has more stuff in it. I've also got some Velcro. Velcro is very useful for sticking stuff to things. I got this for... Why did I get this, actually? It's very useful. but you stick it to something and then you can stick it to something else and then they stick together. So, useful thing. I should probably take that out of my junk drawer. That's actually more useful than junk. I've got some other stuff to stick to walls. I've got an old sign-up thing for a debit card. Ooh, I've got some of my... Why am I thinking of words in Spanish? Business cards. I've got my business cards, because I don't need all of them in my bag at once. So I've got a bunch of extra business cards. That's cool. I've got some extra blades for an X-Acto knife. Very useful tools to have an X-Acto knife. And the blades do go dull, so I have extra blades here. I've got a backup battery for my camera. That's useful. I had to buy them in a pack of two, so I ended up with two different batteries. I've got the box for my headphones, which are ZSN Pros, which were pretty cheap. They were like 20, 25 bucks, and they're super good quality. I'm using them right now. They're very useful. And then I've got some extra sticky notes and some journals. I have a journal where I tried to learn to draw. I did, how many, I did quite a, I think I did like 30 days, yeah, over a month. I did 39 days of daily drawing. And I realized that drawing isn't for me. I gave it a shot and, well, these aren't literally terrible. They're better than I thought. But I still didn't really enjoy it that much is the thing. Like I really ran out of inspiration to continue. But huh, these aren't as bad as I thought they were. That's kinda cool. Nice, I haven't really gone back to my drawings before. And whoa, that one's actually really cool. I copied it from something, but like, I didn't trace it, so huh, that's neat. And then I actually also have my old gold list method journal. I made a video about this on the refold YouTube channel, but the gold list method is sort of an alternative for studying words. And I actually did it for 30 days, 50, uh, yeah, like almost two months. It looks like no way more. Wow. Again, I did more than I thought. I did it every day for, it looks like three months, and this journal is now full of stuff. So that's kind of cool. I get to see that journal and those are words I learned. Let's see, on day 55, this is the fourth, no, the second of, April 2023, I learned the word lavarse el coco, which is to brainwash or literally to wash your coconut, which is a way of saying the brain, right? So lavarse el coco is to brainwash somebody or brainwash yourself or something like that, which is funny. Some interesting words in here. I know a lot of these already, so that looks like it worked. But yeah, anyways, we are over time again. Sorry about that, but that has been my junk drawer episode. Let me know down in the comments below, what do you have in your junk drawer? That might be a good excuse to look up some really random words in English and learn how to say them. But that's really everything for me. I hope that you enjoyed this pretty different episode today. Let me know if you enjoyed it and what you thought, but I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode of A Daily Dose of English. Bye.
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