Recipe for Fun
1. Go to CostPlus World Market and buy a $10 jar of salt scrub. I like the Peppermint Rosemary one. If you take someone with you, that person might wrinkle her nose at the generic-looking packaging of your jar and say, “Why don’t you just go to Origins?” You can just give her a sage look. Don’t bother to explain that Origins sells you half the salt for twice the price and that, besides, their whole store smells like funky mint gum.
2. Put the salt scrub into a cabinet in your bathroom. Leave it there until it’s ripe. You’ll know it’s ripe when you start screaming at people for really petty reasons and fantasizing aloud about quitting your job and considering eating Shipley’s donuts for dinner. (Usually a Friday afternoon.)
3. Give everyone in your house pizza, cat food or video games until they aren’t squealing at you anymore. Go into your bedroom and close the door.
4. Turn on Windows Media Player. Click “Now Playing”. Click “Favorites (4 or 5 Rated)”. Turn it up as loud as you can.
5. Crouch down in your tub like an animal with your jar of salt scrub. Open it up and stick your big fist in it and squish all the contents between your knuckles. This isn’t just satisfying – it also mixes the salt and the oil.
6. Scoop out big handfuls of the salt and smear it all over yourself, stopping to rub it into your skin every so often. Especially your feet. Jeez, your feet are all dried up and rough. Do your back and your neck, too. Use the whole freaking jar. Use that shit up til it’s gone.
7. Don’t shave your legs before you do this. (That’s the step I always forget – the not-shaving step. Salt gives your shaved legs razor burn.)
8. Pretend you’re back in the womb. Unless, of course, your mom was a drug addict or something while she was pregnant with you. In that case, you have permission to pretend you’re in my womb. I didn’t smoke or drink when I was pregnant. I didn’t even drink caffeine. I did yell at my ex-husband a lot, though. I went into screaming, hormonally induced rages from time to time. But maybe that will make you a more assertive person. And, besides, it wasn’t always like that. Most of the time I listened to really good music. You would have had good taste in music and a bit of artistic talent if you’d come out of me.
9. It’s up to you if you want to salt one of your kids so he’ll stop asking you if he can take a bubble bath in the other bathroom (i.e., slop water all over the floor). It depends on how old your kid is and how hippy-dippy you are about nudity. To each parent her/his own.
10. Turn on the shower while you’re still sitting on the floor of the tub. Let it wash over your head like the rain you’re always trying to avoid in the outside world. It’s fun.
11. Before you try to get up, clean your palms and the soles of your feet really well with soap or maybe even with shampoo, because you’ll be super slippery and you don’t want to fall down. (“I feel like rubber,” said my kid. “I feel like a dolphin!”) Then get up and take a regular shower. Unless you have super dry skin, maybe. Maybe you’ll just want to get off and pat-dry your oily skin, then. Not me. I’m oily enough on my own. I take a shower and then get out. I put a towel on my head and old clothes on my body, and then I work on my blog.
Woo. That was fun.
