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Friday, October 21, 2011

If you are having a bad day, say your pet tiger just escaped and was shot by the local sheriff, or your basement flooded and the 100 pounds of Jasmine rice that you were saving for a rainy day cooked itself and expanded so much that it burst though the walls of your closet and oozed all over the basement and now every mouse in the county has moved in, or perhaps it is the sixtieth birthday of your ex-husband, or it would have been his 60th, had he lived, and you are miserable and overwhelmed by sadness and intimations of mortality, well there is only one thing I can suggest to alleviate the problem: reorganize out your medicine cabinet.
Perhaps this is not the first thing that occurred to you.
But I can vouch for its efficacy.
I found it impossible to weep while I figuring out the difference between witch hazel and hydrogen peroxide, and then memorizing their many hitherto-unknown-to-me uses, such as: Hydrogen peroxide for whitening animal bones, removing fresh blood stains, controlling fish fungus, and removing skunk odor.
Witch hazel for pimples, hemorrhoids & after shave.
And in order to count how many packages of dental floss (more than 8, all freebies from the dentist) you have, you must concentrate and that means you are not obsessing about birthday presents you might have given your ex-husband when he was not your ex, and alive. It is impossible to simultaneously calculate the total length of dental floss and regret that you never found him a first edition of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.
[Since reading the expiration dates of all the OTC medications is sure to remind you of mortality, I would not recommend that route.]
Instead, organize all your tubes and bottles of sunscreen and arrange them in ascending order of SPF strength (Bain de Soleil 8 to Neutrogena 70).
And if the above is not enough distraction from your misery, you can tackle the mystery of why you have so many tubes of Neosporin (Original and Maximum Strength), Bacitracin, Hydrocortisone cream and Benadryl anti-itch cream.
And please, let me know what you figure out.
As a last resort: paint the inside of the medicine cabinet bright blue or green.

4 comments:

Anne said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anne said...

This original post had to be removed for typos. "This is good advice."

Trying to sort through, weed out mold from and not cry over thirty years of life stored in a flooded basement (on a cliff?!?)--my basement, my life, that is--well, all I could do was get into my car and put 1200 miles on it going north, south, west and east.

And all along I could have just stayed home and sorted out the medicine cabinet

Diggitt said...

I painted the inside of the medicine cabinet in my new apartment the same bright yellow as the bathroom itself. Yellow ALWAYS makes me feel great (which is why I also carry yellow umbrellas most of the time) but is missing in the Twin Cities--except in my bathroom and kitchen.

Having just cleaned out my sweetheart's kitchen, I can warn you that EVEN IF THE NUTELLA HAS NEVER BEEN OPENED, if the sell-by date was 2002, you should leave it closed as you remove it.

Rebecca Rice said...

I loved this post--the humor, the despair beneath the humor, the quirky details.

Your writing is positively medicinal!