ETcetera...THE OTHERWORLDLY REPORT

I think we’re dirty. We must be. We need a lot of soap. I realized this when I ran out of hand soap the other day and had to think twice about whether it would be ok if I used a little of my dish soap, just until I made it to the store. I must be a dirty girl, but you must be very dirty too. We have soap for our dirty little clothes and special soap for our delicates and unmentionables. We have soap for our dirty little houses, a separate one for handwashing our dishes (but not our hands), but not to be confused with the soap for the dishwasher, another for our countertops, another for our floors and our windows, and also our cars. We have soap for our dirty little human bodies, but each part seems to need its very own individual soap. And we never use human soap on our pets. They have their own. And big human soaps are very different from little baby soaps. Men need the deodorant kind and women need the gentle kind to be sparkling clean and fresh in their own biological ways. Babies h...

THE ILL CARE SYSTEM A long time ago when I was in college, I remember feeling unusually fatigued. I slept through my morning classes whether it was in my seat or in my dorm room bed. Something was wrong. Since I was too young to have my own general practitioner, I ended up asking my Mom’s doctor why I might be feeling this way. He said that as a college kid, I probably wasn’t eating right or getting enough rest. But I was persistent. “Nope. Something is wrong,” I said. I intuitively knew my own body. So he agreed to take a blood test, after which time he profusely apologized. I had hypoglycemia (low blood sugar.) Twenty-five years later, this scenario repeated itself with a different doctor, only this time it had an interesting twist. “I’m tired all the time,” I said. “I think you are depressed,” the female doctor replied. “Nope. I’m not depressed. I’m tired,” I responded, a bit irritated that she was slapping a label on me and seemed excited about shoving a pill down my throa...