Monday:

Why don’t you get driving gloves for the lawn mower? You know, like my never-met-idol Karl lagerfeld always wore? They truly make it more comfortable to drive the bumpy machine, but you’ll also feel like Lord Carnarvon recklessly driving to Highclere Castle at shameful speeds before the accident that left him ill enough to seek the warmer climes of Egypt. We might still not know about King Tut if it weren’t for his terrible driving practices. That’s a stretch, admittedly, but it’s not wrong, and it makes work a lot more fun for me. My yard isn’t in the English countryside but I certainly pretend it’s a country estate and my driving glove fantasy really helps. This is certainly one of the more ME things I’ve suggested. 

Tuesday:

Why don’t you let me tell you something extremely private and academically damaging? I’m captivated, endlessly curious, and delighted by a show on The History Channel…a cable channel that is too often as removed from reality as Fox News is from reality. (My ((🤫)) beloved Ancient Aliens speaks volumes to their lack of credibility in 2021.) Anyway, the show is called, dramatically, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, and it holds me at rapt attention. It’s about perplexing anomalies that occur on a ranch in Utah. I know it’s television, so most of it is hype…yet I hope something about it is real. It’s so curious. It makes me think of so many subjects that intrigue me. I love that we don’t know everything just yet. The world and the universe are still mysterious waiting for be unraveled. 

Wednesday:

Why don’t you run to the kitchen and clean the ice maker in your refrigerator? I’m not a dirty person, but I never once thought to look at the ice maker. Nobody told me to. It didn’t look possible, and it turns out to not be simple, but necessary. You guys…in the summer, gnats are attracted to water and they sometimes congregate in that cone where the ice pours out. It’s disgusting. I was mortified. I felt ashamed. I felt a fraud. I cleaned the entire thing IMMEDIATELY which should have been much simpler if this is a somewhat common issue. Anyway, I get a little nervous every time I get ice, but there no longer seems to be an army of gnats clinging to my ice. It was so gross, y’all. I hated it. 

Thursday:

Why don’t you learn something new and set your digital watch to display numbers in a foreign language? It doesn’t matter if you know the numbers or even how to pronounce them, but three is always going to be where you expect it. Seeing the unexpected numerals forces your brain to become familiar with them. My watch is set to show Arabic script and the numbers one through twelve are pretty much memorized now. When I’m in Egypt; my favorite thing to do on long road trips is try to convert the license plate numbers of people we pass from Arabic into what I’m familiar with. Time flew by. Anyway, don’t waste another second of your life.

Friday:

Why don’t you take an Epsom salt bath? There’s all sorts of pseudoscientific reasons why you’d want to, but I just wanted to see how much weight I could lose sitting in hot, salty water like I was at an Icelandic spa. Turns out not much. But I wasn’t following any protocol. I guess professional fighters and actors can lose like 15 pounds in a single day by not drinking water and then drying out in a salt bath. It’s basically the early stages of human mummification…which was of course additionally fascinating for me. I didn’t lose any significant weight, but I did find myself feeling enormously relaxed, which I almost never truly do. Some people say that they are so drained by an Epsom bath that they fear they might never get out of the tub or they’ll drown. I was eager to feel a little loopy to see what the fuss was all about, but in the end, I just felt chill, which works just as well for me, I suppose.