"I think that carrying on a life that is meant to be private in public is a breach of taste, common sense, and mental hygiene."*

She-Ra, Princess of Power

            Sometimes showering and putting on clean clothes is a task to which I don’t feel equal (why is it so hard to end sentences without prepositions without sounding like a pretentious ass?). There are days when lying around in my pajamas actually feels like not only a good idea but the ONLY idea.

            I went over to my friends Tom and Jess’s house the other night, and we all sat around their fire pit in the back yard and had a few too many cocktails and caught up on life and all that good stuff. And then I ate a bunch of their Thanksgiving leftovers and slept on the couch—where their two Boston terriers and long-haired cat (Hammy, Ribs and Frankfurter/"Furtie" respectively) like to relax— in Jess’s pajama bottoms.

            I’m so glad that adulthood doesn’t preclude me from going to sleepovers.

            But this whole hygiene thing can be a real bitch.

            So I lay around most of yesterday in my own filth, reeking like pork products (and pets named for pork products) and not feeling up to the job of washing the fur and the smell of fire smoke out of my hair or trying to make the skin around my mouth stop peeling off my face (I think that was a combo of Retin-A and flames flying at my face; not, like, old yogurt or something).

            But then I did it. I showered. And it felt great. I even flossed and shaved my legs for the first time in a couple of weeks (the shaving, not the flossing—though the flossing could happen a little more often). I was further inspired to wash my sheets for the first time in...we'll say, "a little while."

            And then I felt like Wonder Woman or She-Ra, Princess of Power. Like I could take on the day (or what was left of the night).  And I did a little bit of writing, cleaned some dinner dishes, and read a bunch of pages of a book that many consider to be an important work of literature.  

            It was Twilight. (I'm kidding! Or am I?) 

            So, here’s to hygiene! It lifts you up, rescues your day (even if your day is almost over) and makes you feel less like an unemployed jackass with syphilis or one of those weird diseases no one talks about anymore, like Hansen's (the cute name for leprosy).  

*The above quote is courtesy of one of America's finest film actresses, Myrna Loy.