Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/21/08

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Product Placement

Household hint for today: If you've got a cast or some sort of surgical dressing that needs to be waterproofed whenever you bathe, wrap it in Glad Press'n Seal. It sticks to itself and to the skin, and doesn't need as much tape to hold it in place.

I learned this tip from a nurse at the Ambulatory Treatment Infusion Center (acronymically called, of course, "the attic") when I was describing how hard it was to wrap a plastic bag around my left arm with my right hand in order to cover my PICC line. They had given me one of those plastic sleeve thingies that are usually used to cover casts, but it also covered my left hand, meaning I couldn't use it to wash with.

So I got a roll of Press'n Seal (why they can't call it, more correctly, "Press 'n' Seal" I don't know) and sure enough, it does the trick.

What a strange little world of expediencies I have found myself in.