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ribbon of snot
Monday, March 7 2016
I spent the day lying on couches, starting in the living room where I woke up this morning. Gretchen made me some toast, which was so good that I later staggered to my feet and made myself a third piece. I didn't yet have a good place to put the snotty toilet paper I was now generating in numerous little wads, so I kept flinging them at the woodstove, where I'd been drying them before burning them. One piece hit the stove and disgorged its snot, which clung in a four-inch ribbon. Unfortunately, Gretchen saw it and was so grossed out she couldn't bring herself to clean it up. So I stumbled yet again to my feet and used a wet piece of toilet paper to sponge the nastiness away. The part of the ribbon of snot that had adhered to the hot surface of the stove looked exactly like a dollop of frying mozarella cheese leaking from a piece of pizza.
Eventually Gretchen found me a trashcan to put my snotty toilet paper in. But this was occasionally an attractive nuissance for Ramona. Her idea of vegan fusion cuisine might be salsa with toilet paper.
Later this afternoon, I went down to the greenhouse and managed to have a nice long nap. Later when I went to sleep back in the house, I did so with the assistance of diphenhydramine, the active ingredient in Benadryl.
We have a lot of cold medications in our house, all with various brand names in large fonts. But all I care about are the actual chemicals in these medications, and these are always printed in a tiny font that my aging eyes (particularly during this illness) have trouble reading. There are only about five or six different chemicals used in all over-the-counter cold medications, and it's actually easier to keep track of what is what by knowing those than it is to try to remember what precisely the effects of the various brands are. There's also the problem that many cold remedies are cocktails that included potentially-dangerous components such as acetaminophen. When one is sick and eating large numbers of pills, it's important to track the dosages of such chemicals, which the brand-identity paradigm helps to obscure. This is just another example of how the widespread (and advertiser-encouraged) focus on brands (as opposed to specifications) contributes to ignorance and even danger without actually simplifying decisionmaking. Ideally, I'd have big jars, each containing identical pills having a particular active ingredient, and I would mix and match them as needed for my condition. But, sadly, we don't live in my brand-free utopia.
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