It's the simple things in life that can make you mental.

It's the simple things, sometimes, that make you scream or laugh or shake your head in awe and then keep screaming until they come and give you a nice, soothing shot.  One small part of your day, one small effort that changes the trajectory of how things go.  It's amazing how a little effort, a little event, can sometimes lead to major ramifications.  To wit:

*** Finding a pubic hair in the cookbook you checked out in the library.  Why is it there?  Who is reading a library's copy of a cookbook in a situation where pubic hair would find its way on the page?  Is there enough hand sanitizer in the world to use after realizing I had touched a book that a pervy possibly disease laden person had touched?  These are the questions that make me cry, like in a fever dream.  And it simply reinforces my disinterest in using the library.  Come on, people.  Stop being so fucking disgusting.

*** Feeling good about yourself for getting up and going to the harder water aerobics class even though it's 1,000 degrees outside and you're tired.  Sometimes it just feels good to make that little extra effort to take care of yourself.  It puts a bit of pep in your step and makes you feel like a champion.  You can work harder, you can make better food choices.  All from the one simple step of choosing to make your health a priority.  You're can do anything.  Except remember to put on deoderant, so that you spend the rest of the day wondering what the hell that smell is before finally realizing, at 7:00pm, that that smell?  Is you.

*** Introducing a friend to the wonder that is It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  A simple thing like having your treasure made known to the world gives you such a good feeling inside, like you are sharing a secret gift that only the truly blessed can receive.  I am stunned when people don't know about this show - and I say this will all the indignant fervor of someone who started watching it about 2 or 3 months ago, even though it actually started in 2005.  Still, it's such a great feeling of sharing, like when you had circle time in kindergarten and everyone's attention had to be ON YOU while you held up your treasure and explained, in numbing detail, how you found that shell at the beach after you were digging a moat around the sandcastle you and your cousins made and how your cousin wanted it, but you knew that it was meant to be yours and how you brought it home and put it on your windowsill to remind you of the beach, and then how you had to move it because your stupid brother kept taking it and putting it in his mouth. 

What the hell was I talking about?  It's been a long day.

Seriously, sometimes the best simple thing I can do is just go to bed. 

That Time I Stayed in the Canadian Version of the Bates Motel. I Hate You, Niagara Falls.

Many years ago, our family was invited to a destination wedding.  Not somewhere magical like the Bahamas. Nope.

Niagara Falls. 

Where we ended up staying in:

The Bates Motel

Not the ACTUAL Bates Motel. No.  That one was drier and far less disgusting.

We were given instructions to make reservations at this hotel or, more accurately, House of Creepiness, by the family having the wedding.

WHO DID NOT STAY THERE.

Which we didn't find out until the end of the weekend.  Nice, right?  Did they get a look and go running?  Did they get a cut of the rental rates?  I don't know, but I don't really talk to them anymore.  Had you been there, you wouldn't blame me.

We get to this place and are skeeved out.  Seriously.  It smelled like dank.  My parent's room? Had damp carpeting.  Our room? Had the sink that wouldn't stop running.  Some cousins were in the room that had super-scary noises. 

I ask for extra pillows and am informed that there are none.  How is that possible?  Are they being used to smother and bury guests from times past?

We spent a LOT of time not in the room.  Hotel sex? Yeah, not happening.

I think the icing on the cake was that at the nice hotel across the street, where there was a party for the wedding guests the night before, the room rates were the same.  Why didn't we switch hotels? I have no idea - I was for it, but everyone else had been beaten down by the sadness and despair clouding Bates Motel Niagara and figured one more night wouldn't hurt. 

Except it did.  It hurt my soul.  It also hurt my ability to stay in any cheap ass hotel, making our trips way more expensive.  But then so was the therapy and the 8,000 loads of laundry I did to wash the stink of that trip out of our clothing.

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This is a Studio 30 Plus writing prompt.  Yeah, boy. [You have to say that like Flavor Flav.  Trust me.  It's fun.]