Recommendations – Sharing the World with the Undead

The biography jar offered up the following topic: Tell about home cures or old wives’ tales for curing hiccups, warts, toothaches, colds, earaches, birth control, arthritis, etc.

Ummm… The jar strikes again. What kind of a silly topic is this? We don’t have many such cures here. I suppose I could record a few:

Professional development meetings can be cured by massages that last at least one hour.

There are no cures for colds. Drambuie may nevertheless seem medicinal. Saline nose spray never hurts.

No one should ever try any old wive’s tale for birth control. The best cure for curing birth control — if you want to read the sentence above literally — will be pregnancy although menopause serves equally well.

Directly applying Selsun Blue to a fungal infection caught from a cat will cure the infection after doctors have failed you. I remember this one from my twenties. I did not want to pay for a culture so my mom suggested the Selsun Blue plan first. I will recommend this unusual home cure. It saved me a lot of money. You end up with red, irritated skin for about a week but eventually that passes and you are cured.

Need a home cure for anxiety? Meditation alleviates anxiety. So does hypnosis. Spirit animals and animal manifestions of your inner child can also prove useful.

Readers: What does your inner child look like? The toddler-you has a great deal of wisdom. She/he knows when you are doing things that are not fun, for example. The toddler-you will naturally steer you away from tedious obligations and toward hot fudge sundaes. If you think life is not enough fun lately, you might try visualizing the toddler-you. Find yourself and have a conversation.

You don’t need to listen. If she says, “Quit that job now!” you might want to reason with her. But older is not necessarily smarter. Wisdom can be learned. Wisdom can also be forgotten.

Readers: Do you have home cures? What are they? Feel free to journal on this topic.

Having merged the blogs, I will make one zombie observation: That idea where you cover yourself in zombie blood to avoid attracting the zombies? Ummmm, do the words “blood-borne virus” sound any of the cymbals in your cortex?

For zombie fluids management, I offer one word: Bleach.

Or even better, as mommy used to say, “Don’t touch!”

This house is full of old paper journals. I write behind dragons, Dr. Who and bilingual workshops. My organizational scheme unravels often and I only vaguely know what kind of information falls behind which cover. My mother wrote on her calendars, a clever plan that somehow I never picked up. Calendars make dating unnecessary while limiting entry size. If journaling sounds like too much work, those little date boxes should make the task less intimidating. I recommend calendar journals to readers who are thinking they don’t have time to record daily events in their already busy schedules.

I suspect I skipped calendar journals because I always have more to say than a 1 or 1.5 inch box allows, but I appreciate reading what my mom wrote. “Sherry and Steve went ice skating today. We stopped for ice cream. Virg to Kiwanis. Talked to Patsy.” These entries are barest bones, but my brother and I can use them to go back in time. I see my dad in the brown Kiwanis suit with his starched white shirt and tie. I see my mom in one of many long conversations with her sister, sitting on the built-in, beige bench in front of the large front window of the Tacoma house, holding our black, rotary phone. I remember the sights and smells of the old ice rink, the battered, heavy white rental skates.

Calendar journals may be an easy place for some people to start.