Your Brain!!

I saw an advertisement the other day in a magazine, complete with color pictures, that showed me what two brains looked like. One was, “This is your brain.” Looked a good bit like a handful of curdled cheese to me. The one right beside it said, “This is your brain on drugs.” Dear hearts, that poor little curdled cheese brain looked like it had been dropped into hot bacon drippings and fried crisp. I threw out all the aspirin in my medicine cabinet and read the labels on all the canned food to make sure there were no drugs listed. Even the peanut butter went into the trash.

If they can take pictures of a brain like that, it caused me to wonder just what other brains look like. Evidently all brains, be they owned by rocket scientist or a common old ditch digger, look somewhat alike until they are faced with various tests and trials.

This is your brain on puberty. It would have pictures of rock music stars tattooed upon the frontal lobes. The back side would have an array of Techni-color impressions of wild hair, tongue rings and baggy britches with no belts. If they use advanced technology and take a picture of the inside of a puberty afflicted brain, it would show an enormous hole. Somewhat like that black hole in space. There’s has to be room for all the things they need to learn when they find out just how little they do know.

This is your brain before a diet. It puffed up with a nice big smiley face on the top. This is your brain on the first day of a diet. The smiley face is frowning. This is your brain on the thirtieth day of a diet. The smiley face is gone and there’s only half as much brain as before. It can’t make rational decisions and rattles around in the skull like an old maid in a two story house. This is your brain on the second day in which you fell off the diet wagon. The smiley face is back and it’s puffing up real nice.

This is your brain after spending the day with a two year old. The frontal lobe is pierced, somewhat like that metal art they do with a nail and a hammer. It has the letters W-H-Y drilled into it so deeply, they probably wouldn’t disappear even with a healthy chunk of chocolate swirl cheesecake to help puff it back up. The side lobe is purple and green. That’s a bruise where the little darlin’s sippy cup hit you sixteen times when you were trying to take it away from him. The other side is swiveled up like a piece of cheese that’s been left in the refrigerator for six months. That’s the side that dealt with chasing him all day. There’s a possibility it will never rebuild itself.

This is your brain after thirty years of marriage. It’s compartmentalized into color coded areas. The red one knows where Husband hides his dirty socks and all the tools he can’t find laying out in plain view in the garage. The blue one knows that he hates frozen Brussels sprouts, loves chocolate almond ice cream and tolerates fudge sickles. The orange one knows all his family’s birthdays, their names down to the third cousins once removed and fifth cousins by marriage.

This is your brain after a shopping trip. There’s little lightning bolts sending messages to your feet to get off them because they ache so bad. There’s a calculator in the frontal lobe adding up all the money you spent. There’s a file cabinet in the back lobe full of excuses as to why you needed a pair of red sequined high heeled shoes. A special form is provided in the right side that lets you fill out a request for a short termed loan at the local bank. Yes, you may use your puberty stricken daughter for collateral. Just don’t expect the loan to exceed the double digit figures.

This is your brain after your mother-in-law has spent a week with you. It resembles a little rounded piece of curdled cheese that someone hacked to pieces with a meat cleaver. It knows it’s supposed to be all in a piece, but like the kitchen drawers, the linen closet and the closets after she leaves, it can’t find where it’s supposed to go.

I figured the brain on drugs would look rather tame in comparison to those brains. I dug the aspirin and the peanut butter out of the trash, ate two aspirin and made myself a PB&J sandwich.