I have a small collection of vials that usually hide in the back of the medicine cabinet, relics of desperate times. There's the one I bought when my child was still not sleeping and I thought, as many sleep-deprived parents do, well, maybe it's teething, and maybe this little sugar pill thing really might work. There's the sugar pills I bought to put under my own tongue when I was super-pregnant and super-irritable and somebody somewhere told me that this stuff was good for bringing you "out of the bitch basement." There are drops to mix with water to balance mood, a mouth spritzy thing for stress relief.
Each of these reminds me of times when I had tried everything else I could think of, when I was so hopeless that I was willing to cast aside my sense of logic and my preference for evidence-based medicine in exchange for the promise of a cure. All of them, as far as I'm concerned, useless. I don't give any credence to homeopathy. There are many proven herbal remedies but unproven, illogical tinctures of squid ink and floral essences? I never believed they worked beyond the placebo effect...and if you don't believe in the stuff you're sniffing, you don't even get self-delusive peace for your money.
In the end, they got my cash, and I got to muse over the fact that sometimes, all that works is giving in to the craptastic moment you're in and just sitting still with it. Sometimes taking that moment to tell yourself that you're going to survive it is the real rescue remedy.
Was I completely bamboozled? (I never bought an amber necklace, does that count for anything?)
Griff seems to agree that I'm easy to dupe, just take a look at this drawing, in which he (left) prevents me (right) from finding his secret lair (below) with the oldest trick in the book. Safe from discovery is the hideout below a false platform. If you click through to the flickr page you can view it larger or see notes labeling the items in his den.
Note the date on the calendar. Nice touch!
And speaking of science, this is an amazing lecture transcript that expresses so much of how I feel about science. Awesome food for thought.
Tonight, snow! AKA #snomg2 on Twitter. Ha!
