You can rent a potato and go for a swim

Gene Mage

People who take themselves seriously rarely take the business seriously. Those of you who are condemned to share your office with a certifiable sourpuss may need a little levity to get through the week. Need to lighten up a little? Here are some suggestions:

Watch an animal. I find my toy poodle Holly uproariously funny, even though she spends most of her waking life disassembling our otherwise well-ordered house fiber by fiber.
Eat something new. The other day we made fondue, as part of our “Seventies” cultural re-education process. I never did get the cake to stay on the fork. Why not just pour the stuff over whatever you are eating? Not much nutrition, but loads of fun.
Look for unbelievable items on eBay. An eastern box turtle signed by Richard Nixon? Thirty-four original ABBA posters printed in Swedish? How about a full gross of vintage Ban Roll-On antiperspirant, rescued from a recently demolished K-Mart in Des Moines?
Make sculptures out of tube socks. Did you know that you can roll an ordinary tube sock into an uncanny reproduction of a powdered sugar donut?
Pretend you are an archeologist studying your own back yard. As you ponder each object you find, draw conclusions about the lifestyles of the people who lived there many years ago.
Read a novel in the bathtub. Just don’t fall asleep before the water cools off. A rolled up towel makes a nice headrest.
Look over old pictures. Nothing pops an overstuffed ego faster than a picture of what you looked like with a beehive hairdo.
Whittle. Remember whittling? Just sit down on the back step, grab a piece of driftwood, and start carving little likenesses of your favorite New York politicians.
Watch commercials with the sound off. Make up your own subtitles as you watch people getting whiter whites and brighter brights in just one wash.
Host a jam-session. Nothing like a bunch of middle-aged musicians making noise to blow the cobwebs off of some best-forgotten memories.
Send an invoice to Microsoft. Invoice them for all the wasted time and lost productivity they have caused over the past decade every time Windows crashed.
Throw stuff away. Be savage. Tear into old shelves and boxes and cabinets. Toss out those old binders. Give away all 17 volumes of Time-Life’s “Surgery at Home” series you bought from a telemarketer.
Conduct a sumo contest. Stuff a pillow under your shirt (if necessary), find a partner, get a running start, and create a massive collision.
Wax things. Our friend waxed the highly polished bench in front of the pipe organ at church. On Sunday, gracefully sitting to take his place behind the keyboard, he slid all the way across the bench landing perilously close to the pastor’s feet.
Make up new associations to join. How about the American Society of Plant Psychologists? Perhaps you might be welcomed at the Mid-Atlantic Belly Button Lint Preservation League. Everyone can find their niche in this world.
Buy everything they sell on infomercials. Did you know you can cook a chicken on an empty Budweiser can? What happens if you mix the baldness-cure with the hair-remover? Do they cancel each other out? Add up all the promises. You could be a real estate millionaire with a body-builder’s physique in just six weeks if only all that stuff really worked.
Watch TV at 3:00am. I never noticed that Donna Reed did her hair that way. She was really quite the trend setter! And how did they dig all those tunnels on Hogan’s Heroes anyway? Maybe you can catch that BBC documentary on cheese making during PBS pledge week before you finally fall asleep.

A few of you may be concerned that by smiling you will cause permanent tissue damage to the muscles of your face. Perhaps Mom gave you raw lemons to use as a teething ring. But research has shown that you can re-train your face to look much more pleasant if you start slowly and stick with the program.