You can’t beat heartburn by eating more tacos.

Well, I don’t know, maybe you can.  Y’know if you eat tacos made out of Tums…

But generally speaking, when you’ve dug yourself a hole, and you’re in over your head, you need to stop digging.  Seriously, put the shovel down.  If you got yourself into a bad situation through a particular set of behavior, you’re probably not going to get yourself out of it by continuing to repeat that same behavior.  

Which, of course, is easy to say, but not always so easy to do.  I get a little bit bonkers when I misplace something.  If I’m feeling relaxed and groovy I can stop and reflect and remember where I had it last and sure enough, there it is.  But if I’m under stress (like, say, looking for my keys when I need to have left five minutes ago…) or otherwise distracted (like say, not having gotten enough sleep for three days running…) the situation is gonna get stupid.  Fast.

I start out okay.  I look where I think the widget in question ought to be.  Not there.   So I move on to the next most likely place it’d be.  Not there either.  And on down the line, usually four or five steps deep.  And still no widget.  So clearly the widget is somewhere I haven’t looked.  But I’m too tired, or stressed out, or whatever to see that simple and obvious truth.  So I go back to location one, where I invariably fail again to find my widget.  So on to location two, still no widget, and on down the line.

By this time I’m angry.  What is obvious to me is not that the widget is somewhere I’m not looking, but that the widget is evading me.  It’s gleefully scampering through the house, always a step or two ahead of me.  Or I’ll get paranoid and decide it’s been stolen, or abducted by aliens, or something equally nefarious.  Obviously it’s vanished.  Obviously.

The incredible thing is, regardless of what I believe has happened to it, I’m still stalking from room to room, getting angrier, and still looking for the widget in precisely all the locations I already know that it isn’t.  And at some point I snap.  And give up.  Then I can breathe and think for a second.  And maybe look under the table instead of on top of it.  Or behind the bookcase and not next to it.  And sure enough, there’s the widget.  Miraculously restored to me via alien intervention.  Or something.

So guess who misplaced his pill minder tonight, and found it under the keyboard, and not next to it…