Thursday, January 31, 2008

Balm for the Bequalmed

A recent post on one of my favorite blogtrotting ports of call, crowcrastination, concerned coping mechanisms, and it made me realize that essentially I have three answers to all of life’s problems. In ascending order of magnitude, they are:



1. Caffeine. Like Mary Hartman before me, I’ve found that the disclosure of almost any revelation can be countered with the phrase: “Do you want some coffee?”

2. Hot, hot baths. Ideally, these should be just a degree hotter than you can stand. Seriously, a distractingly hot bath is like a psychic reset button.

3. Get a bigger problem. For ex: once a friend of mine was mulling over declaring bankruptcy over a debt of about 14K. His mother slapped him upside the head and said, “If you were any kind of a man you’d owe at least 100,000!”

Come to think of it, she offered this counsel in kitchen, where she was preparing coffee. Which was really, really hot.

Of course this can backfire. Many, years ago, I was working at a major regional theater, which shall go unnamed, when a major coup ejected the much-hated upper echelon of administrators. Unfortunately, the replacements turned out to be even worse. As one of the surviving conspirators put it: “We got rid of the Romanovs, now we have to deal with the Bolsheviks.”

Still, the old problems did vanish, like snow on water. So you pick your poison. The devil you know, etc etc.

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A response to: “If I keep the ice cube trays filled…..no one will die.”

2 comments:

k. crow said...

To complete this weird cosmic circle, I stepped out of a piping hot bath just before I read this. It does function as a cure all.

C A Wohlmut said...

ahhh, caffine, it gets me through many a tech week, particularly now that we have 2 TWO! children who are morning people. How the he@! did that happen to a nice night owl like me!!!