Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2002-02-09 - 11:30 a.m.

Your Kids Need To Know

I wanted to be a grown up for a long, long time. Sometimes I still do. When I was little, being a grownup seemed pretty magical...late nights, cocktails, and never ever ever brushing your teeth.

Then I got older and that seemed pretty funny, how bad I wanted to grow up when I was little, because as an adult I knew about real stuff like taxes and broken hearts and shit jobs and car insurance and having to tell someone you didn't want to date them any more and dental insurance.

I thought I had it all figured out, all the upsides and down sides of being a grownup, of good and bad stuff you had to do. Having been married and had kids and gotten divorced, I didn't figure I was going to add anything else to the list of Grownup Experiences for a few decades.

I did not, at that point, know about washing out your sinuses.

I did not, in those years, even know I possessed sinuses. I had no reason to know. Holes in my head? I'd been accused, but I never took it seriously.

I knew a lot of things one might do with a glass of water, but deliberately snorting it up my nostrils was not on that list. I spent my childhood trying NOT to snort water. Not to snort ANY fluids. Snorting fluids was not a pleasant experience.

It still isn't.

I found out about sinuses and about snorting water all in the same day. I had a cold. I had a bad cold. I did not go to the doctor - what kind of an idiot goes to the doctor with a COLD? It's viral, it's going around, it'll go away, that'll be eighty dollars. But then, my face started hurting. Really hurting. My face. Hey, faces aren't supposed to hurt. Heads, necks, stomachs, all kinds of things get aches, but not, you know, your FACE.

Round about the time I was considering buying one of those old style hand drills and putting a few relief holes into my cheekbones, I visited the doc. "You won't believe this, but my face really hurts." "Yeah, you and half the county, you dumbshit."

Apparently, sinus infections are something we may become more prone to in our...our...ummm..middle years. Oh yes. And when one has a raging sinus infection, one's face aches. Oh yes. One's teeth - the ones I once thought adults didn't have to brush - feel as though they are in one of those machine gun ammo belts and may at any moment start shooting out of one's mouth across the room, injuring others but possibly providing some relief from the pain. Drilling your cheekbones no longer seems so insane a thought. Should you drop something on the floor, you eye it warily and say, "I don't need ANYTHING bad enough to bend over right now."

Part of the cure for this condition is a cute little routine with salt and warm water. You put the salt in the warm water and then you put the water up your nose. Not in your nose, but incredibly enough, UP your nose. You can do this with a bulb syringe, or you can buy a fancy new age pottery nose teapot, or - my choice - you can simply take a handful or water and SNORT it right up there. Right up your nose. Where you can then blow/spit it out, in much worse condition than it went in, because it takes the Reverse Mountain Dew path: In your nose and back out your nose and mouth, instead of in your mouth and inadvertently back out your nose. It does not feel any better than Mountain Dew, though, and it doesn't look any better, either.

After the nurse practitioner is through explaining this to you, and you're through saying, "Is this a joke? You want me to WHAT?" then you find out you get to do this like four times A DAY. It isn't just a one-snort deal. And it certainly speaks to the amount of pain your face can give you that you will actually go home and do this thing, over and over.

So. If you're on the cusp of growing up, and you're in that, "Screw this, I'm tired of somebody always being the boss of me, I'm an adult now, I'm going to get out there and do whatever I want to," I want you to go in the bathroom and snort a cup of warm salt water right up your nose. Now. That's the grown-up stuff, man. That's what we do. You might want to stretch that childhood out a while longer.

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