Stocking up

(The picture is irrelevant, but those are my adorable nieces and nephew)
One of the best Christmas gifts I ever got was a huge box filled with various types of medicine. At the time, I just thought it was funny, but months later when I had a sore throat and actually had a remedy for it in my house, well, I was never so grateful. It was from my now-former father-in-law, and he bought it because I had become notorious in their family for not keeping medicine in my home. Their son, who was prone to getting ill, had to drive over to their house to pillage the medicine cabinet everytime he had a headache. Poor bastard.

In my "medicine cabinet," there are no cures for any kind of ailment (except wrinkles, dry skin and bad breath). Once I had a jar of ibuprofen, but that belonged to a roommate. Currently, I have a box of halls that my boyfriend bought me when I had a sore throat. The only thing that bothered me more than the sore throat was the taste of those lozenges; only one is missing from the 2-year-old box.

The lack of medicine in my life isn't just because I don't get sick. It goes deeper than that. Some people are planners. Take my roommate for example. Under her bed she has one of those giant rolling tupperware thingys filled with backups of every beauty product she'll ever need. Shampoo. Conditioner. Cotton swabs. Hair brushes. Rubberbands. It's a virtual pharmacy under her bed. Under my bed? Giant dust bunnies, summer clothes and a duffel bag of the journals I've kept over the years.*

I have only one of everything I need. I don't deny that it makes sense to live like my roommate; I even envy the sense of stability she must feel. Yet I cannot bring myself to buy something at the store unless I absolutely need it. I have to be down to the last squirt of contact solution, the last squeeze of the toothpaste tube, before I will venture into the drug store section of my grocery store. I've even tried buying things I don't yet need. Every so often I'll see a bag of cotton balls displayed at the end of an aisle as I'm walking toward the items I actually need, and my body simply will not allow me to buy the cotton balls when I know there are cotton balls in the cabinet at home. Or when I bought my multi-vitamins a few months ago, I stared at the shelves stocked with Tylenol and Advil type products, and did the math in my head. Sure, I drink a lot of wine. But will I get $8.00 worth of headaches before this thing expires in four years? Nope. Back to the salad dressing.

Just like everything else, it stems from my childhood. Growing up, we were not allowed to get sick. Our medicine supply was limited to a box of generic aspirin under the sink that my dad stole from his first-aid kit at work. Beyond that, if you got really sick, you either had to ask mom to go to the store and buy you a cure for your ailment or suck it up. Either way, you were going to school. I could be bleeding out my eyes, and my mom would have handed me a square of toilet paper and said, "Go to school."

I'm afraid I am making my mom sound like a total bitch. She's not at all. She's actually the best mom in the world (seriously), but she is intolerant of the not-deathly ill. I mean, I heard the woman just two weeks ago call my dad a pussy for having a cold. And my dad never gets sick, so on the rare occasion that he does, you'd think she'd have some sympathy for the man she's been married to for 33 years. Nope. Suck it up, old man, and go to work.

What's in your medicine cabinet?

* I'm really hating this personality flaw right now, as I was in a mini-quiche eating contest last night and lost, and I would kill for some pepto bismol. A bottle of ibuprofen would be nice as well to combat the wicked headache I'm fighting because of the bottle of pinot I drank just before the quiche eating began.