Life, are you listening?
Some days, I get that serendipitous feeling that everything is in
its right place, ghosts of the past back in their graves, plans for the
future all providently arranged in a colour-coded excel sheet. Then along
comes a day like this one, to throw a monkey wrench into the works and
turn all those daylong good feelings into dump. Nothing salvageable. Worse
than kitty litter. Makes me rethink my life’s casting-screenplay-direction.
It all started when the air-conditioning decided to stuff my nose up
for me a while ago. South it went from there – my perky countenance in
a hooded heap surrounded by used tissues. My berating bronchus turning
heads everywhere for not-so-popular reasons. Between phlegmatic 10 a.m
presentations and fending off avoidance behaviour from the boyfriend at
10 p.m (I don’t want to catch your cold) I caught reflections of my rapidly
sinking eyes in ever-darkening circles in the mirror. Then I caught
something else too.
A pimple. The size of a global disaster. On the forehead.
Now I know what you’re probably thinking.
WTF! This girl has a pimple and it’s a global emergency?
#sooolamesooofirstworld
I was right I shouldn’t have bothered to read this in the first place and
now I kind of really can’t be bothered to give a shit.
You are right.
But I’m already here now so may as well…gosh buzzfeed is worse today…
what is she on about any way gawd this woman she’s so full of herself
So as I was saying, I was in an emergency. Then I remembered something
from my college days, when my landlady Linda once told me that
the quickest fix for a pimple is to put some toothpaste on it. She was a
remnant from back in the day when women used soup cans in four different
ways, founded vocations like fashion and interior designing while tidying
up their living rooms or sewing buttons on their blouses. They had a great
deal of general knowledge about the sundry other you’ll-never-guess uses
of kitchen ingredients and domestic cleaning products and belonged to a
posse of 1950s housewives who were later called raging feminists.
I rushed to my cabinet and squeezed some Colgate out and smeared
a white blob over the giant red dot on my forehead. Now all I had to do
was wait. For a few hours. And while I did, I fell asleep sashaying around
Linda. The poor thing. The once young and desirable Linda. All I ever
made of her was that she archetyped the kind and gentle if wayward aunt
– tending her herb garden meticulously or sorting her vinyl records by
year of release or living one day at a time while she spoke of adopting an
active interest someday in Rembrandt’s etchings. And her affection for
Amy Winehouse. Discernment.
A few hours passed.
Tell me she did about the menthol cooling the hot pimple. Worked
like a charm. Tell me she did not about the THIRD-DEGREE BURN
FROM THE SODA BICARB in the paste. Now my forehead resembles
Gorbachev’s. And Linda isn’t my landlady anymore.
So do I rub the lemon juice on my forehead now? Ouch, I guess not.
She used to say something about pomegranate…ah, what was it now? I
suppose I should google an aunt. Why not when it can find exact matches
straight from Galen’s handbook, name all skin specialists in my area and
get me there like now too?
Because in 1950, Linda and thousands like her didn’t have it when
their quick fixes and home-made cures turned into disasters. No. In her
day, troubleshooting involved the trouble, not just the shooting. Linda
used to have her girlfriends over, make pots of tea and bake cakes (using
the soda bicarb). They used to talk about someone’s new curtains, someone
else’s relationship woes, yet another’s hopes and dreams for Broadway and
what to do when confronted by fear, authority, the other woman in the
marriage. And pimples.
Somewhere out there, Linda is probably thinking of the wily young
things she’s provided boarding and lodging to over the years, wondering
what’s become of them all.
Then again, likely not.
But if she is, I’m sure she’d be happy to know that at least one of
them has discovered that clay baked potatoes also leave us with beautifully
burnished clay to later paint on. And that the nasty burn is fading away,
thanks to some scoured papaya seeds (pomegranate not in season).
Some days, I get that serendipitous feeling that everything is in
its right place, ghosts of the past back in their graves, plans for the
future all providently arranged in a colour-coded excel sheet. Then along
comes a day like this one, to throw a monkey wrench into the works and
turn all those daylong good feelings into dump. Nothing salvageable. Worse
than kitty litter. Makes me rethink my life’s casting-screenplay-direction.
It all started when the air-conditioning decided to stuff my nose up
for me a while ago. South it went from there – my perky countenance in
a hooded heap surrounded by used tissues. My berating bronchus turning
heads everywhere for not-so-popular reasons. Between phlegmatic 10 a.m
presentations and fending off avoidance behaviour from the boyfriend at
10 p.m (I don’t want to catch your cold) I caught reflections of my rapidly
sinking eyes in ever-darkening circles in the mirror. Then I caught
something else too.
A pimple. The size of a global disaster. On the forehead.
Now I know what you’re probably thinking.
WTF! This girl has a pimple and it’s a global emergency?
#sooolamesooofirstworld
I was right I shouldn’t have bothered to read this in the first place and
now I kind of really can’t be bothered to give a shit.
You are right.
But I’m already here now so may as well…gosh buzzfeed is worse today…
what is she on about any way gawd this woman she’s so full of herself
So as I was saying, I was in an emergency. Then I remembered something
from my college days, when my landlady Linda once told me that
the quickest fix for a pimple is to put some toothpaste on it. She was a
remnant from back in the day when women used soup cans in four different
ways, founded vocations like fashion and interior designing while tidying
up their living rooms or sewing buttons on their blouses. They had a great
deal of general knowledge about the sundry other you’ll-never-guess uses
of kitchen ingredients and domestic cleaning products and belonged to a
posse of 1950s housewives who were later called raging feminists.
I rushed to my cabinet and squeezed some Colgate out and smeared
a white blob over the giant red dot on my forehead. Now all I had to do
was wait. For a few hours. And while I did, I fell asleep sashaying around
Linda. The poor thing. The once young and desirable Linda. All I ever
made of her was that she archetyped the kind and gentle if wayward aunt
– tending her herb garden meticulously or sorting her vinyl records by
year of release or living one day at a time while she spoke of adopting an
active interest someday in Rembrandt’s etchings. And her affection for
Amy Winehouse. Discernment.
A few hours passed.
Tell me she did about the menthol cooling the hot pimple. Worked
like a charm. Tell me she did not about the THIRD-DEGREE BURN
FROM THE SODA BICARB in the paste. Now my forehead resembles
Gorbachev’s. And Linda isn’t my landlady anymore.
So do I rub the lemon juice on my forehead now? Ouch, I guess not.
She used to say something about pomegranate…ah, what was it now? I
suppose I should google an aunt. Why not when it can find exact matches
straight from Galen’s handbook, name all skin specialists in my area and
get me there like now too?
Because in 1950, Linda and thousands like her didn’t have it when
their quick fixes and home-made cures turned into disasters. No. In her
day, troubleshooting involved the trouble, not just the shooting. Linda
used to have her girlfriends over, make pots of tea and bake cakes (using
the soda bicarb). They used to talk about someone’s new curtains, someone
else’s relationship woes, yet another’s hopes and dreams for Broadway and
what to do when confronted by fear, authority, the other woman in the
marriage. And pimples.
Somewhere out there, Linda is probably thinking of the wily young
things she’s provided boarding and lodging to over the years, wondering
what’s become of them all.
Then again, likely not.
But if she is, I’m sure she’d be happy to know that at least one of
them has discovered that clay baked potatoes also leave us with beautifully
burnished clay to later paint on. And that the nasty burn is fading away,
thanks to some scoured papaya seeds (pomegranate not in season).
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