Shelly at This Eclectic Life is a Red Headed Texan with quite a vivid imagination; she seems to think I have 8 valuable tidbits of knowledge that I should pass along to you. Let me share a little secret with you – I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly those 8 things are since yesterday morning. Now there’s a scary thought.

Shelly is a smart woman. She definitely knows 8 very important things, and then some. So go read hers, and then click away to another blog, because if you come back here, I’ll be as pale as an Irish Lass on Venice Beach in late July.

I told her I’d give it a shot though – so I may have to give the whole serious deliberation a rest and go with a few of the more whimsical thoughts that came to mind when I started thinking this through. Without further procrastination adieu, here goes:

1. Don’t hold your potty while you’re running to the bathroom. It really doesn’t hold anything in. If you gotta go, you gotta go, and nothing is going to stop that. You may as well forego looking like a total dork who waited too long on your way to wet your pants. If you have a bladder control problem, that’s what Depends are for.
2. Don’t flick your boogers. You never know who they’re going to land on. It’s better to just eat them, or wipe them on your spouses pant leg.
3. A latte a day keeps the sleepies away. Just be sure you’ve got a double or triple shot of espresso.
4. Don’t take too many photos of the same dang thing. No one really wants to see a house sparrow blink in slow motion. There are some exceptions to this one, squirrels, for example. You can’t have too many photos of squirrels.
5. Don’t wear clothes that are too small. Have a look in the mirror. If your junk is hanging out of your trunk, change your clothes. If you think there’s a little bump, it’s really 10x the size of how you see it to the general population. Hide it. Duct tape it. Do whatever you gotta do, but don’t let it hang all out there and don’t walk around thinking you’re hot stuff when really, you look like a bratwurst on the grill bursting out of the slit in the skin. Oh, yes, and if they’re too big and falling down around your buttcrack, buy a belt. The whole “look who we’ve got our Hanes on now” is just a commercial. Don’t take it too seriously – we really don’t all care to know.
6. Stop and smell the roses. Once a day, find a flower and stick your nose in it. Breathe in. Deeply. (Note: check for bees first. – thanks for pointing that out, Shelly. I can only imagine the lawsuits I would have had to deal with on that one.)
7. Count your friends. Because some day, your kids are going to ask “How many friends do you have, mommy?” And if you can’t answer that, they’ll make fun of you. Then they’ll tell you that you really only have one friend, and then you’ll feel like a big loser.
8. Laugh. And then laugh some more. Because laughter really is the best medicine, and it’s also funny when your parrot starts mocking you and laughing back in your own laugh. Then you get to find out how stupid your laugh really sounds, and you can practice a new laugh in front of the mirror – out of earshot of the parrot, of course.

There you have it. I hope you find my list invaluable, and that you must bookmark it so that you are less likely to forget anything. Send it to your friends, because some people just don’t even know any of this stuff yet, and you could save them the trouble of having to figure it out all by themselves.

I’m not tagging anyone, but please let me know if you want to take this on and share your wisdom with the blogosphere. I’ll link you up and send people to you, and then Google will love you just as much as I do.