great things to do when you're sick

Growing up we were always trying to think of the perfect illness: one that made it absolutely mandatory that you stay in bed, but made you feel well enough to eat foods you like, talk, enjoy television, and maybe play table football or some other very low impact sport. I think one day we agreed on head lice but I'm still not completely convinced.

A while ago I got sick and it wasn't head lice or any other near-perfect sickness, but there was still a ton to do. Here are things you can do when you're sick, organized by great and terrible for your convenience.

Great things to do:

Hot socks magic trick

Right before you go to sleep, put on very hot wet cotton socks, then dry regular-temperature wool socks. You'll wake up with dry feet and no runny nose WHERE DOES THE SNOT GO? I have no idea.

Take the longest shower ever

If it ends it's too short.

Drink tea

I recommend licorice, peppermint, ginger, chamomile, lemon, chai, cinnamon, echinacea, kava, or hazelnut. And I don't even know what a few of those words mean.

Watch Cat Parade

Take a taxi

When I didn't have a way to get home and I was too tired to walk or take the bus I called a taxi and luckily it was a magic taxi, the warmest and darkest and most comfortable in the world, and it smelled like gingerbread, and the taxi driver was like an even prettier friendlier taxi-driving Carey Mulligan. I may have been hallucinating. Which brings me to,

Terrible things to do:

Hallucinate

Rinse your mouth with salt water

It's like tasting death!

Drink red liquid medicine

This isn't so much a blog post as a promise to my mom that I'm going to take better care of myself. 

hats and a love story

My family has one photo of my great-grandmother when she was a baby, and she is wearing the best hat I have ever seen on anyone, especially a baby. Her dad was a hat-maker, so I guess she had her pick of great hats. Being a hat maker was a thing back then, I also guess.

Today I think hats are mainly a way to tell people what sports team you like, but when my great-great-grandfather made hats, it didn't matter what sports team you liked. Hats were for everyone. In fact I've spent a lot of time looking at this photo of my great-grandmother and I still have no idea what sports team she liked. This is all true.

And then the part that isn't true, but that I love, is that one day my great-grandmother grew up and fell in love with a man with the biggest skull in the world, a man that looked terrible in hats, a man whose children would have globes instead of heads and would also look terrible in hats and would never have mysterious baby pictures wearing million-dollar hats. It was the opposite of everything her parents wanted for her. And she sat them down and she said "Listen, there are ten things in the world that are less important than love, and one of them is hats."

And she married him, and her dad came to the wedding in a hat so fantastic the other wedding guests wanted to scratch their eyes out so it would be the last thing they ever saw.

And she had seven children, each with a bigger head than the one before. That is why my grandmother's head is so big she uses a punch bowl as a fitting tool when she crochets beanies. That is why my mom's head is so big she can't ride bikes because no helmets will fit. And that is why my head is so big that when I look in the mirror it is hard to see both the left and right edges of it, and that is why I look terrible in hats, and that is why if you want to know what my favorite sports team is, you will have to ask me. It's the Minnesota Twins.

Pictures to break up the text!

Two plants I don't own but am interested in killing

This is just a warning.

1. LEAF TREE FIG PLANT

That's not it's real name but I don't like its real name so you can click through the photo to find out what it's really called. Look how beautiful it looks in this beautiful sunny expensive apartment and imagine how great it would look in my sometimes-clean not-at-all-expensive apartment! It is native to Western Africa and seems totally easy to take care of.

2. ZZ PLANT

Also not the real name but in this case it is a real, commonly-used abbreviation.

And it also happens to be an off-color slang word in French!

It would look so good for the few days it was alive and as a bonus it is super poisonous.

3. EVERY PLANT I HAVE EVER SEEN.

Portland safari

When I left work the other day there was a tour bus driving by - for some reason our street is a must-see if you want to spot Portland landmarks like rain, a handful of coffee shops, a grocery store, and

"...here is a place that makes advertisements you know about." a tour guide minutes away from boring herself to sleep said over a loudspeaker.

Growing up my siblings and I shared an obsession with animal facts and a morbid fascination with the zoo. We went as often as possible. Summer was zoo season and if you observed any animal in captivity in the Twin Cities between 1996 and 2006, we were there, and you heard us.

"In the wild a lion this size would cover 65 miles of the Sahara a day, chasing gazelles and wildebeest." we'd tell strangers watching a lion napping next to a bowl of hamburger patties in an enclosure the size of an office cubicle.

"Look at his fur, it would kill his mother to see him like this. Good thing he's never seen his family."

"Rhythmic swimming like that is the first sign of dementia."

"Let's get an ice cream and then look at that depressed giraffe with the curved neck."

The other day in Portland the tour bus passengers looked at me with the same expression: the way you look at a polar bear in the corner of a cement room, slowly chewing on his arm.

"In the wild a writer this size would get up to eight hours of sleep."

"See how she hunches like that? Another ten years and she'll be lucky if she can stand."

"What's that in her hand? Is that just a fistful of bread? I can't watch this anymore."

Dispatches from Aix en Provence

I don't really recognize myself lately.

Because the last couple days have been made up of really lazy activities. Like sitting at a cafe spending fifteen minutes slowing drinking a hot chocolate and fifteen minutes not drinking a room-temperature chocolate. And today I woke up from some sort of trance and I was in a lipstick store which is apparently a thing, trying on a third tube of red lipstick.

"Don't just dot it like that," said a saleswoman who looked like a very pretty clown. She waved the mirror closer at me. "Do big stripes, go all around.

"That's good but do another loop." said the only stranger whose face I would gladly wash.

"I don't even recognize you!" she finally said, I heard it minutes later because her voice had to travel through the deep layers of makeup that separated us, and the sound became more muffled as it crossed each barrier, making what should have been screams of terror sound like delighted praise.