• If you have to use Aspercreme on sore muscles, wash and rewash your hands. Once or twice is not good enough, because should the icy-hot fire somehow get around your what-not area, it will burn for hours and you will be miserable.
  • If you haven’t already done so, just get on with it.
  • Eat chips and chocolate.
  • Drink regular Coke and Pepsi.
  • Go to your bathroom stall at work and take out the book you’ve been trying to finish for weeks and go ahead and read a couple of pages per trip. You can make special trips. This will make you especially happy with feelings that you have duped everyone.
  • Don’t hesitate to sleep. Defend your sleep privileges to the death. If you have to tell the Gays they are too stressful to be around right now, so be it. You’re their Princess; they will surely forgive you.
  • Lay out.
  • Jump in random pools. Or at least imagine jumping in pools irrationally over a period of no less than 5 hours of constant “I should jump in a pool” loops running in your head.
  • Find an Air Force John. He will not have the energy to blow you off. He will want to cuddle with you. Except that maybe he only responded because he’s intoxicated and watching “WifeSwap” when he’s a 26-year-old military man. Anyhow, he will respond if prompted and offer distraction, if not frustration and perplexation.
  • Never mind if “perplexation” is a word. It should be. Own it.
  • Even if you know you will have to write about it again sometime, keep your darkness at bay. It’s the only way to keep from crying racking sobs every day.
  • Do not think about your dead aunt.
  • Do not think about your impending summer program.
  • Do not worry about tan lines.
  • Recognize raisins are good for you.
  • Stay conscious for only mere minutes of time until drifting off into something as close to peace as you get.