Suebob's Red Stapler

I have taken to my bed.

That sounds so grandly Victorian, as if I have a lace coverlet and a chambermaid to fluff my pillows as I recover from some genteel lady-disease.

If only. The truth is far more grubby and wrinkled, with half-empty water glasses crowding every surface and the crumbs of dry cereal (one of the few things I have felt like eating) sprinkled over the dog-fur befouled duvet cover. Until, that is, said dog decides to climb up and lick every surface, trying to Hoover up the cereal crumbs, because obviously the $3/pound dog food I’m buying her at Sal’s Doggie Gourmet Palace isn’t making the grade.

So Downton Abbey it isn’t.

The worst part is that this whole business is completely and utterly my own fault. As a germophobe, I wish I could lay the blame at the feet of someone I came into contact with, but no, I’m pretty sure I brought this plague upon my own house.

After listening to the RadioLab show about how important intestinal flora are to our mood and health. The show contains a fascinating piece about how mice who ate yogurt – which is rife with probiotics, or good bacteria, have more emotional resilience than other mice (listen to the show. It explains the whole thing).

Well, hey, I thought, I want to be a mouse that keeps swimming! I want to be emotionally resilient! I was encouraged by my friend Annette, who even emailed me an article about probiotics, an article that mentioned that you should be very careful to start taking probiotics slowly, bit by bit.

Which, of course, I promptly forgot. I dove into the massive case of probiotics at our local health food store and finally, after much reading of bottles and listening with one ear to the worker there talk to another woman, selected one completely at random.

I came home and popped the pill. No big deal.

Except.

Two hours later, I felt like the contents of Mount Vesuvius had been emptied into my belly. Or maybe a couple pair of fighting otters. In any case, it wasn’t good.

It turns out that my own intestinal flora, who had been happily occupying my guts for 50+ years, were now under attack by foreign flora, and they weren’t happy. There was literally a fight to the death going on IN MY STOMACH.

Without being too graphic, here’s how the night went: vomiting. Fever. Chills. Muscle aches. Rinse. Repeat. Again. Again. Again.

So don’t try this at home, kids, lest you end up spending two days in bed drinking ginger ale and coconut water, eating dry cereal, and feeling like your intestinal flora have given you a good, hard beating with a baseball bat.

PS What’s up with netflix? So much content, and so little good to stream.

There are times when I’m glad I live by myself.

Strike that. I’m always glad I live by myself, but some times I am more glad than others.

Also: remind me not to eat the cheese that’s in the square container in the fridge. Now it is dog cheese.

Not cheese made of dog milk, mind you. I don’t even know how you milk a dog (“You can milk anything with nipples.” “Can you milk me, Greg?” NAME THAT MOVIE).

Cheese FOR the dog. Because I sure as hell am not going to eat it now that I scrubbed the floor with it.

Do you want to know how I ended up scrubbing the floor with cheese? And why I’m glad I live by myself? Those two things are closely related.

I had cheese in the fridge, like a sane person. And the cheese fell out of the fridge, as cheese sometimes does, and it fell out of its container, but it stayed mostly in, so I could just cut the floor-touched piece off and move on with my life. I could be more obsessive about germs, and throw the cheese away, but why waste a $5 piece of cheese because a corner of it touched the floor, a corner that is now cut off and put in the trash? My parents didn’t survive the Great Depression so I could throw away perfectly good cheese.

I put the cheese back in the fridge, like a sane person.

Then I reached in the fridge for something else, and the cheese fell BACK out of the fridge just to annoy me. It fell all the way on the floor like a very bad cheese, like a cheese that I hadn’t just cared for enough to trim and return to its place in the fridge, where a sane person keeps cheese.

So I had to become insane, of course. I had to show that cheese who was boss, because that stupid Cotija was not going to pull this crap with ME.

I scrubbed the floor with cheese. I took the cheese and mauled the cheese. For about 15 seconds, like a completely not sane person, I scrubbed the cheese back and forth across the floor, damning that cheese to hell. Now how do you like being out of the fridge, cheese? Huh? Huh?

Like I said, it’s a good thing I live alone. Because of cheese. And other stuff.

Then I cleaned up, like a sane person, and saved the cheese for the dog, because if there’s one thing she doesn’t mind, it’s dirt, and because I’m not going to waste a perfectly good piece of $5 cheese just because it has dirt ground into it from me scrubbing it on the floor. Like a not sane person.

The first night of Hanukkah is tomorrow night. Hanukkah is also called the “Festival of Lights” because it celebrates the miracle of oil for a lamp lasting 8 days instead of just the one it was expected to.

Then we swing into Christmas season, where we celebrate with lights and candles…the season of light is upon us.

Here’s my request to you for the season beginning tomorrow and ending at the new year: give yourself a month off from criticizing yourself. If you’re like most people, a voice inside you tells you just how bad you are. The voice feels free to speak badly to you, no matter how minor your infraction.

You dropped a can of food? “You idiot!”

You forgot to get gas for the car- “You loser! What is wrong with you?”

And worse. Far, far worse.

So try, just try, this month, to silence the voice with a laugh at how ridiculous its accusations are, or with an inner “Shhhhh.” Or maybe, as I do, yell “SHUT UP, PARASITE!”

(Do not do this last suggestion in public places, though. The 72-hour lockup is no place to spend the holidays).

The voice lies. The voice exaggerates. The voice has nothing useful to say to you. Don’t you deserve an inner voice that is at least as nice to you as your outer voice is when you’re talking happily to your loved ones?

(The correct answer is YES, YOU DO).

Give the voice the month off. Let your heart be light.

“The sign of Christmas is a star, a light in

– A Course in Miracles

There’s some truly bad music in Zumba. This is my favorite example. The music doesn’t begin til 43 seconds in…don’t ask me what the intro is all about. 

There’s a moment at the beginning of Zumba class where I often get a catch in my throat and tears fill my eyes for a second.

I know Zumba is silly. Part of the reason that I get verklempt is that it is so silly, and yet we humans get together a few times a week to do it. We all put on our little colorful outfits, leave our homes, and come to the same spot to do…what? Shake our butts and move our feet in complicated patterns? It’s ridiculous.

I find it touching, this nuttiness.

I’m also so thankful that I can do it. There was a time in my life where I couldn’t move at all without excruciating pain. There was a time I weighed 224 pounds and couldn’t dance for five minutes, much less 55. And there were years of my sister Laura’s life where she couldn’t move her body at all.

So I go out there, colorfully clad and silly, and grin, hugely, as I shake my butt as hard as I possibly can, even though I can never keep up with Jorge, our instructor who seems to have WD40 in his hips. I do it for me. I do it for being relatively pain-free, today. I do it because my sister couldn’t.

I grin because I’m having fun. I grin because I am here now, doing this. And that’s enough.