Years ago, Miss Barbara on Romper Room taught me to “Turn That Frown Upside Down!” when I was sad or angry. Of course I was sad and angry every time I watched Romper Room because notonce did Miss Barbara see an “Elyse” in her magic mirror.
She should have seen me in that damn mirror. I was a good kid. (Google Image)
Oops. Sorry. That isn’t what this post is about.
I’ve actually found over the years that for the normal level of bummed-out-ness, turning my frown upside down (TMFUD) is quite an effective anti-depressant. It is even more efficacious when combined with a walk and/or singing. If I TMFUD while walking and singing, I am a happy camper. (Of course the other folks around me might not be quite so smiley.)
As I got older though, I found that TMFUD was less effective against the bigger things that life threw at me. I needed something approaching “schadenfreude,” which, as you know, is taking pleasure in others’ misfortune.
Now, I don’t think that I ever really – even to this day – actually take pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. I’m somewhat nicer than that.
But I do like to look at someone else’s troubles and balance them against my own. Then I am much more willing to keep my own. And I feel immensely relieved.
In the early 1980s, neither my sister Judy nor I were, umm, living the high life. Life was one crisis after another for both of us. I was sick and poor. She was a young mother –that wasn’t the bad part — with no education, no prospects, and a shaky relationship with her husband. She was also poor.
Her problems always seemed worse than mine, and she felt the same way about my troubles. It made us content with our own struggles. So, being sisters, we made our respective miseries and misfortunes something of a contest.
I called Jude one day with bad news about the state of my health and she stopped me before I’d gotten the “woe” out in “woe is me.” Bitch.
“This morning,” Judy announced, “I woke up and went downstairs to make coffee.” I could picture her standing with one hand on her hip, taking a drag from her cigarette. “And do you know what happened as I walked across the cold floor in my bare feet?”
I knew it wasn’t going to be good.
“I stepped in mouse intestines — in my bare feet!” Judy’s cat, Izzy, a prolific hunter, had brought home some spoils for the family. “Nobody’s should start the day with mouse intestines between their toes.”
Google Image
Judy was right — no day should start that way. And that was when I co-opted the motto for my life:
Life is Good*
* As long as you don’t have mouse intestines between your toes.
I’ve never seen that Tee-shirt in the series. I think they need to expand.
Anyway, sadly Judy is gone, and I’d kind of forgotten about my motto.
In the last six months while I’ve been under the weather, not having Judy’s misfortunes to compare mine to made feeling crappy much crappier.
But today I stumbled across a story that inspired me, just the way my sister Judy used to. It made me feel that somebody is worse off than me. And it made me glad that I have my own troubles, and not this woman’s.
Today I read a story about a woman whose situation makes me squirm.
A story that made me realize that things for me really aren’t so bad.
A story that turned my frown upside down.
It was an article about an unfortunate woman who, while vacationing in Peru, had a bit of bad luck. A horn of plenty, running over with misfortune. A veritable ear full of it.
A British woman returned from a holiday in Peru hearing scratching noises inside her head was told she was being attacked by flesh-eating maggots living inside her ear.
Ewwwwwwww.
They aren’t all this cute. (Google image, natch)
Those Tee-shirt guys need to snap this motto up fast. Because really:
Life is good*
*As long as you don’t have flesh-eating maggots inside your ear.
Well, maybe life isn’t so good if you were eating when you read this. Then, I just bet, life could be better.
It was about 5-1/2 years ago when I first recommended canonization of my husband, John, to the Vatican. Even though I am a very lapsed Catholic, I’m sure they’ll go along with it. Because he really does deserve it. Good spouses of many people with chronic diseases deserve special recognition, but I’m pretty sure only John deserves sainthood. Because all the good saints have been tortured, haven’t they? And John absolutely fits that bill.
Saint Sebastian by Il Sodoma, c. 1525 (Image from Wikipedia) I couldn’t find any saints who were suffocated, so John has a good shot
Let me mention that I’ve been reluctant to write about this subject. But after multiple requests following my last post about good hygiene and the New Jersey Turnpike, I figured I’d just get it over with and get on with my life.
I knew from an early age that there was one moniker I never wanted to have. I never wanted to be a “Pooter-Pack.”
It’s a bad thing, being a Pooter-Pack. Nobody likes them or wants them around. And nobody wants to be called a pooter-pack.
In fact, in possibly the only instance where my brother was caught doing something wrong, Fred’s mouth was washed out with soap for calling our paperboy a “Pooter-Pack.”
What, you might ask is a “Pooter-Pack?”
It’s a pack of pooters, DUH! You know – farts. Butt burps. Cutting the cheese. “Fluff” as my childhood best friend Liz’s family called them for no logical reason.
I did not want to be a pooter-pack. No-sirree Bob. And for the longest time, I wasn’t. Those were golden years that I did not fully appreciate.
To set the record straight, I did not become a pooter-pack that day when all the kids in my 6th grade English class thought I did. I was viciously maligned. Tagged. Ridiculed. It was a hot spring day and my young, innocent, bare leg stuck to my plastic seat. When I moved, I made a nasty fart-like sound with my leg.
Let’s be clear about this: I did not fart. I would have died first.
I wanted to disappear. Disolve. Die. It was so unfair. I didn’t! Not even so much as an SBD! And it had no smell at all because I hadn’t farted. It was a leg, umm, fart. They’re different. Somewhat pleasant, even.
I tried to defend myself, but the whole class heard the noise and believed the boys, not me. I hate them all still.
Fast forward past many fart-free years.
In the early 1980s, I had a severe case of colitis-that-was-really-Crohn’s disease. That was when I really started tooting my own horn. Quietly, though, thankfully. SBDs.
One of the treatments for many kinds of bowel disease is a drug called prednisone. One of prednisone’s most notable symptoms is flatulence. Prednisone does not give a girl delicate lady-like whiffs of something vaguely unpleasant that might induce a brief nose wrinkle.
Nope. Waves of heavy, inescapable stink accompany a person taking prednisone. Like Charlie Brown’s friend, Pig Pen, a smelly cloud hung around me wherever I went.
(Google image. Done by Charles Shultz, of course. Who, I am quite sure never had gas.)
In the Metro. On a bus. In an elevator. In my office. I was engulfed in my nasty, stinky cloud.
In spite of the evidence of everybody’s senses, I never admitted I had a problem. That it was me polluting the air. Nope. I didn’t say a word to anyone. I just couldn’t bear another bit of humiliation. (But frankly, unless there were a whole lot of lucky people around me suffering from anosmia, loss of smell, people were polite or stupid.)
I’m going with polite. Because my friends and co-workers were truly terrific. And they knew just how embarrassing life was for me. You see, when you have bowel disease, you are constantly in humiliating, compromising positions. I’ve written about that many times, including here.
I didn’t mention that I’d become a pooter-pack to my parents, who were, luckily for them, safely in another state. I couldn’t mention it to my sisters, including Beth, the nurse, who would have known the reason (I didn’t) or Judy, who would have laughed herself silly and taken me along with her.
I also didn’t mention it to my roommate, Keily. Keily lived with me. She was exposed to the ill effects of the prednisone but never once broached the subject (she is the biggest-hearted person in the world, my friend Keily is).
I’m pretty sure that my dog, Goliath, loved me more because of the smell. Dogs are gross.
The only person who ever mentioned flatulence to me was my gastroenterologist, Dr. C., the guy who gave me the damn fart pills.
“Are you having any gas?” he’d ask. It was always the last in the usual lineup of embarrassing questions.
I would look him straight in the eye and say:
“Gas? Me? No,” I lied, everysingletime.
Dr. C would tilt his head like Goliath and look straight at me as we sat together in my stink cloud. Every time he’d wait for my answer to change.
It never did.
As far as my medical records from that time are concerned, I have never ummm, fluffed. Dr. C surely wrote me up in a medical journal somewhere. Or perhaps he went to a doctor to have his own sense of smell assessed.
Anyway, I had my surgery and for years I lived up to what I told Dr. C. I did not pooter. Truthfully this time.
I’m not sure that that was what first attracted John to me, but I’m sure the fact that I did not have a stink cloud around me didn’t hurt. We’d been married about 20 years when my Crohn’s symptoms, ummm, re-erupted in about 2006.
I felt fine, actually. But something peculiar happened whenever I would go to bed. It started out slowly, gently, and then progressed to putrid: Whenever I lay down, my bottom end erupted. The most noxious substance passed out of my body and into the air in the bedroom.
It never happened if I was upright. Ever. Only John had to deal with it.
“There’s actually some comfort in it,” John said towards the beginning. “Not every husband can be sure that their wife won’t lay with another man.”
I pursed my lips and glared at him.
Still, I couldn’t imagine what could possibly be happening. But then I started to worry. You see, when I had my surgery in 1982, which was for documented colitis, the doctors disagreed after the fact about what I had. If it came back within 10 years, it was Crohn’s; if it didn’t, it was colitis. It turned out that it was Crohn’s that came back over 20 years later. And it came back with a bang.
The first person I told my gaseous problem to was my late sister, Beth. Beth was a nurse, and she was incredibly smart. Amazing, in fact. She could diagnose any malady in a nano-second. So I told her about my problem, and that it was getting worse.
“I really don’t know what to do,” I told her.
“Gee, Lease,” she said sympathetically, “It sounds like you could clear Walmart.”
“Thanks, Beth. That helps.”
“Try some GasX,” she recommended a bit more helpfully.
And I did. GasX works. It really does. It even works on weird gas problems like mine. Sort of.
At that time, GasX was available in two forms. One that claimed it kept gas away for 4 hours, and the other said it kept it away for 6 hours. Never was a drug label more accurately written. Because exactly at 4 hours plus one second, all that stored up flatulence would burst out into my bedroom, like a neutron bomb. In the middle of the night, and into the place where my poor husband tried to sleep with me.
He never complained. Occasionally, he would moan “Oh, Lease,” but I’m sure that was just his way of searching for oxygen.
My boss, a physician, noticed me researching flatulence one day, and asked me why. I confessed my problem to her.
She stood in my office and laughed until her belly hurt.
It’s never good when a doctor can’t stop laughing after you’ve described your symptoms. Unfortunately, she couldn’t help me either, and she’s brilliant. She’d never heard of reclining flatulence, either. Nor had Google, my bible.
Unlike my previous time as a pooter-pack, this time there was no cloud of stink. Instead, this time the stink formed a curtain, a wall around the bed. It was truly horrible laying there in the poisonous air. But I would, being the good wife I am, try to rid myself of the gas by going to the bathroom.
When I came back? Getting back was like walking through a brick wall. There was literally a physical wall of stinky bricks.
Which brings me to the reason my husband should be canonized. Because for 2 years, and until the third of three different doctors poked and prodded and tested, did the third one figure out what was wrong with me (an internal abscess that required surgery), my husband did not complain that I was not exactly a dream wife.
And never once did he call me a pooter-pack.
* * *
In a last-ditch effort to save a little bit of my nearly exhausted pride, I will tell you that since that surgery, I have not been a pooter-pack. Honest. Would I lie?
You probably know that I love me a bargain. Some times, I just can’t resist. Cheap stuff. Buy one get one for 50% off! Two for the price of one! Seventy-two rolls of Charmin!
So when I heard that former Senator Jim DeMint (R-Shouldda Never Let Him Into Guv-ment-SC) talking about free ultrasounds on the TeeVee, well, I decided right then and there that a bargain is a bargain.
I want me an ultrasound. A vaginal ultrasound.
The fact that I believe in keeping government out of my lady-parts should not get in the way of me getting free stuff.
The fact that I am not pregnant should not stand in the way of me getting free stuff.
The fact that I am post-menopausal should not stand in the way of me getting free stuff.
When something is free, well then I want one. Because it’s a bargain, right? For everybody. Especially those folks who want to look in my vagina. I imagine there is quite a line.
What’s everybody complaining about?
Photo courtesy of “FreakoutNation.com” courtesy of Google
It wasn’t something John and I thought about right off the bat. Nope, there were other more obvious and urgent ways to protect that new baby we’d been lucky enough to adopt.
In fact, we didn’t actually worry about Jacob playing in a house with guns until he was, actually, playing in a house with guns and he was out of our sight.
It was a day or so before we were to leave Connecticut and move back to the DC area. Our neighbors, the Planters, had us over for a good-bye dinner. It was John, me, Linda and Paul, their two grown daughters and their significant others. The eldest daughter, Jade, had a daughter Juniper, who was Jacob’s age.
All was well for a while. They were nice people. Linda had retired from an insurance company and and divided her time between cooking and playing classical piano.We could hear it whenever the windows were open, all summer long. She was quite good. Paul was a upper end contractor. He was also a hunter.
For some reason that I have conveniently forgotten and for which John will never forgive me, I brought up guns and gun control at one point during dinner. It was then that I learned that our soon to be former neighbors believed that they needed an arsenal to fight off the ” black booted” thugs from the government. The US government. Black helicopters. They thought that the 2nd Amendment guaranteed that he could have any weapon that he government had. Including nukes.
Huh?
It was at about that time that I realized that Jacob and Juniper were downstairs. They were being supervised by another relative, so I hadn’t been concerned. But the discussion made me a little uneasy.
I knew there were guns in the house, but I no longer felt quite comfortable that these folks were reasonable. I didn’t know where the guns were, whether they were locked away, or left leaning against the wall somewhere accessible to my 4 year old son.
* * *
That was the last time for many years that I didn’t ask about guns in the home of anyone Jacob played with. Even when the parents seemed like they didn’t fear the guv’ment. Even when they seem like normal folks. Liberals, even.
It is incredibly awkward to ask people if they have guns in their house — akin to saying “excuse me, are you an irresponsible parent who would endanger your own child(ren) as well as mine?”
Still, I had to ask. Every time Jacob went someplace new for many years.
I did it by lying through my teeth. To new friends and acquaintances. I shamelessly blamed my husband:
“I have the most overprotective husband” I would sigh. He made me promise to ask everyone before letting Jacob go play … You don’t have guns in your house, do you? Arsenic? Nukes?” I’d laugh, and the other mother or father would laugh too.
And then they’d answer.
“No, of course not,” was generally the answer. And then I was comfortable letting my son go to their house.
One time, though, I did get a “yes, we have guns in our house” answer. I was surprised. You will be shocked to know that I kept an open mind.
That time, my friend Suzanne invited me and Jacob over, and took me down to her basement and showed me where her husband kept his hunting rifles. In a locked, secure gun safe.
If I had learned that the person had guns and did not secure them, their kid would have been welcome to play at our house any old time. But my son would not have been allowed to play there. Nope. Not a chance. It is simple common sense.
Guns+Kids=Tragedy
Naturally, I felt bad for blaming John. Oh who am I kidding. No I didn’t. It was much less awkward, doing it that way — it made the other parents feel less threatened, less like I thought they were crazy, irresponsible, folks who wanted to kill children. With my way, well, I had the comfortable knowledge that my kid wouldn’t become a statistic. It was worth sacrificing John’s pride for peace of mind. Especially because he still doesn’t know I did it.
Friday, June 21st is “Ask About Guns Day,” sponsored by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Because all too often pediatricians are called on to try to save children who are hurt by guns. They know that asking can save lives.
ASK. Because you don’t want your kid (or grandkid or really any kid) knockin’ on heaven’s door, do you? I just had to ask.
Modern marketing really scares me. And I’m afraid it’s only going to get worse.
A few years ago John and I needed to replace broken toilet that had a built-in shelf above the tank top. (Not the kind of tank top you wear, but the kind with all the parts of a toilet that break.)
We needed a special size and type.
Naturally, I looked online to find the best price. Then off-to Home Depot John and I went expecting to flush away a wad of money.
As we were trying to choose between two models, the salesman tried to help us make the decision:
“You can flush an entire bucket of golf balls down this American Standard toilet and it won’t clog,” he said.
John tilted his head, dog like, and looked at the salesman trying to figure out if he was joking. He wasn’t.
I looked at John and then at the salesman. Somehow I maintained an interested customer demeanor. “Why would we want to do that?” I asked. “We don’t golf.”
“I’m just sayin’ that you could,” said the salesman. “I mean, if you did golf.”
“We probably wouldn’t be golfing in the bathroom,” John said, thoughtfully. “I mean, if we did golf, we wouldn’t golf there. We’d probably do it outside.
“And if we take up golf, I think I’d rather keep the golf balls in the garage,” I added.
“Plus we have a septic system. I don’t know if it is designed for golf balls.”
“It might be hard to explain to the guys when they pump it out.”
We had to leave or we would have wet our pants in the toilet aisle of Home Depot. In spite of the fact that it would be expensive, we opted to replace the innards of our own non-golfing toilet instead of spending – I kid you not – more than $1,000 on a toilet that would fit the spot and accept golf balls.
Since then, though, I have been getting ads for toilets. But not just any old toilet. Strangely shaped toilets. Apparently, to the marketers of America, I not only like to flush strange hard things down my toilets, but I like my toilets to look like anything but. Or butt.
So imagine my dismay when I read this article that explains where modern advertising is heading.
They’re going to mine our DNA
to figure out how to market stuff to us.
The article gives the example of someone who is lactose intolerant getting special coupons for lactose-free stuff.
Oh joy.
I wonder if my DNA will tell folks that I’m not interested in what they’re selling.
Which gene says “NO SOLICITING”?
All the pictures are from Google Images. I can’t wait to see what they try to sell me next!
FiftyFourandAHalf 