I’m facing a pretty serious problem, and it has to do with my Hydroflask.
I rock a mango colored 532 mL bottle, with a wide mouth polyurethane flex cap. Pristine condition. She’s covered with a carefully curated selection of only the finest stickers displaying my interests and morals. At first glance, it seems to be the perfect drinking vessel as well as an excellent means of expressing myself.
But given recent news, my sweet reign of water bottle social excellence has come to an abrupt end.
Right in between my #RobleYearning and my “Straws Suck” stickers, sits my previously placed Chris Brown sticker. I stuck that on her back in 2007 when Kiss Kiss had just come out, and the singer was universally endorsed as a paragon of principle. Recently, however, I’ve learned that Brown has been arrested for a pretty sticky situation involving sexual assault!
Isn’t that nuts? I’ve been listening to his music for years, and this guy was really up there as one of my top non-problematic faves! He’s featured pretty heavily in every single one of my playlists alongside other ethically sound rappers like 6ix9ine and R-Kelly*. I know I should probably stop publicly endorsing him, and I can’t have my PWR 2 professor think that I’m bigoted just because my water bottle modestly supports a known criminal!
I know what you’re thinking: “why don’t you just cover it up with your new gold-leaf embossed, vinyl-cut Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sticker?” Nope. For one, that one is already supposed to go on my laptop since it fits the color scheme. Beyond that, I’ve got a very specific aesthetic of no overlapping stickers, which I refuse to compromise. He is clearly an awful, nearly soulless person, but that’s just a lot to ask of me.
If only stickers had some sort of mechanism by which a previously placed sticker could be somehow removed! Until such technology is invented, I’ll simply have to accept my new status as a social outcast.
*Note: Apparently a video surfaced in 2002 in which R Kelly urinated on a minor.
Thankfully they don’t sell stickers of R Kelly.