A great time to purge your shelves and your life

“I don’t want to scare you,” my husband said quietly to me after Christmas dinner, so my son and daughter wouldn’t hear and be horrified (because “horrified: is usually a party-foul on Christmas), “but there was a maggot crawling up the wall near the bedroom.”

“Oh, not to worry,” I replied. “It’s not a maggot. It’s worms from those blasted little moths that get into the cereal.”

I don’t know how those little buggers get so far away from the cereal boxes. But they do turn up in the darnedest places from time to time — crawling up walls and across ceilings. I’ve been fighting them for weeks, but the moths are winning. Unless you’re very lucky, you know just which ones I mean: they’re very tiny and gray, and come fluttering out of whatever cabinet you store your crackers, cereal and dry goods.

Unless you’re militant about storing things in Tupperware and never allowing an opened box in the cabinet, you’ve probably had an infestation. And, they’re such a pain in the tail to get rid of. The only option is to throw away every opened box, and go through every container to check for grains of rice that move.

I don’t like to kill things, not even bugs, but those moths are an exception. My vision goes all red and sirens go off in my head like The Bride from Kill Bill when she saw an enemy. They must die. I’ve been fending the moths off for weeks, but I can’t seem to completely exterminate them, and cleaning out the kitchen cabinets during the holidays was just too tall a task. I snuffed them out by hand one by one, but every day, one or two more will come fluttering through the kitchen. I was keeping them at bay, at best. But clearly not prevailing. But I also hadn’t been able to locate which box or container they were coming from, and everything I checked looked okay.

My husband, however, had lost his patience with the tiny invaders, and on the spot, just after Christmas dinner, he attacked the cereal cabinet and started pulling things out by the fistful. He was only able to find one container with oat flour that had some unwanted visitors, but I doubt that was the main source. I suspect there’s something somewhere where the bulk of them are coming from. I remember one year, I discovered a pail of walnuts, still in the shell, way in the back of a cabinet, and it was swarming with tiny moths.

This year, it’s still a mystery. But my husband felt satisfied that he’d at least put a dent in their population. However, along the way, he tried to get me to part with cornmeal and raisins and various seeds and miscellaneous whatnot that I’ve hoarded over the year, and insisted they needed to be thrown out. So, while he handed me bags of this and that to throw away, I checked them, didn’t see any movement, and put them back in another cabinet when he wasn’t looking. (I’ll find out if he reads my columns if he, so if he starts searching for cornmeal and raisins to re-purge.)

As Joe attacked the boxes of shredded wheat and pasta, it occurred to me that it was such a symbolic activity for this time of year. The rush and frenzy of Christmas is over, and the decorations are still up for as long as you care to enjoy them, and it’s not quite New Year’s Eve yet. It’s the “down time” of the year, when you can just stop and relax, and think about your next step.

With the new year just ahead, I started thinking about what things in my life needed purging. Just like our cabinets, I think it’s a good time to take a thorough look at everything I’ve stored up over the year and dump out the things/relationships/activities/choices that didn’t serve me well. Toss them into the dumpster, brush my hands together, and move on. Then I can take a long, hard look at the cabinet and see what belongs where, and what needs repackaging, and try to put everything in comfortable and efficient order.

I think that will be a great mental exercise for these last few days of 2011: taking some time to take a walk, sit in the sun, think and ponder, and carefully identify what’s infested with pests or has outlasted its shelf-life, and eliminate it. And once I’m rid of all that, I can turn my attention to the best part: Figuring out what I really want in all that space I just created.

It’s one of life’s great lessons — if you want to add new things, you must first let go of some old ones to make room. And that’s true whether it’s life or a kitchen cabinet crammed with shredded wheat and rice cakes and sunflower seeds. Keep the good stuff, get rid of the bad, and decide what you really want on those shelves.

Here’s to 2012, and looking forward to all good, fresh, new things on the shelf. 2011 didn’t exactly set the bar too high, so it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to top it. If there’s one word to describe 2011, it’s “meh.” (If you don’t get that reference, ask a teenager.) And one way to make life less meh-y is to purge all the moth-eaten stuff from your shelves. If it’s not healthy, toss it. Meh and moths. Less of both in 2012.

Welcome to the NBC Coliseum

So help me God, had I not seen this with my own eyes (albeit nearly squeezed shut in horror), I wouldn’t have believed that anyone could be this desperate. This devoid of integrity. This pathetic.

First, let me ask you: What is the price of your integrity? What line(s) would you never cross for money? Fifty-thousand dollars, let’s say. Would you drink dog urine? Cut off a finger? Leap into a vat of maggots?

As for me, no, no, and no. In fact, I could easily list about a thousand things that’d be too cruel, too disgusting, too painful or too degrading to do for any amount of money. But apparently there are people whose No Way bars are set way lower than mine.

Way.

I discovered this by accident one night after watching a TV show I’d recorded on the DVR. When it ended, I hit “delete” and as the show disappeared into oblivion, it left the television running on the last channel I’d watched: Channel 3/NBC.

It was a segment of “Fear Factor,” which I’ve never watched. I don’t enjoy watching people endanger themselves any more than I enjoy these so-called “reality” shows in which people do and tolerate all sorts of humiliation for a chance to win money, fame or affection. If that’s reality, you can keep it.

So, at the exact moment that I was unfortunate enough to have this sewage splashed into my brain, the show’s host was explaining the next challenge to three swimsuit-clad couples in their quest to win $50,000: jump into this plexiglass tank filled with cow’s blood.

Eww, right? And if you’re a normal person, you’re already balking. Me? I’d have tapped out right there. But wait — it gets ever so much worse.

Once in the tank, continues the host (who apparently has an Olympian gag reflex), one person will dive down to the bottom of the tank and feel around for several raw cow hearts, pick them up one at a time and place it in his/her partner’s MOUTH (are you throwing up a little yet?), then wade through the blood and spit the heart into a container sitting just outside the tank. The couple with the most cow hearts in the container wins.

I absolutely, positively could not believe what I was seeing and hearing, and the only reason I didn’t switch to another channel, any channel, on the spot was because I was sure that at the last minute, just before anyone’s toe dipped into the blood, that a buzzer would sound, and the host would say, “Just kidding, guys! Ten points for your team just for being willing to saturate yourselves in blood and sink your teeth into a cow’s heart! Well done!”

The host didn’t.

And the contestants did.

To my horror, the first couple slid into the blood as the timer started and the man dove beneath the surface. Within seconds, he popped up completely covered in deep red blood, looking like he’d been skinned alive. He handed his partner the heart (which is about as big as a tri-tip roast), and she sunk in her teeth, sloshed to the side and spit it into the container.

And the crowd went wild.

I quickly channeled up to the QVC station for an emergency psychological detox. Sadly, you can’t un-see something like that. And it’s not just the image, but the whole concept, and all its ramifications: How many cows did they slaughter to fill up a hot-tub sized tank with blood? How much suffering does that represent? How long would it take to get your body clean after being saturated in cow blood? How long would it take for your soul? Would you ever really feel clean again? What sort of people even think this kind of thing up? And what sort of people would subject themselves to this level of degradation for a relatively small amount of money? And what sort of people watch this for entertainment?

The last time I was this disgusted with something on television, the same thing had happened. I was switching between recorded programs, and I was snagged by a segment of “The Biggest Loser.” It was the car wreck phenomenon: shock and disgust seized me and I was unable to look away.

There was some sad, sweaty chubby-wubby, red and panting, desperately plodding on a treadmill while that screechy little strip of beef jerky, Jillian Michaels, verbally bullied him and shrieked at him to keep pushing. The guy was clearly dangerously winded, and the sheer irresponsibility of it all astounded me.

As one who has endured sports injury after sports injury, and in every case from ignoring my body’s cues (read: pain) that I was pushing my limits, I wondered if Ms. Michaels would be paying for all the physical therapy required for that guy’s ruptured Achilles tendon or blown-out knee. Moreover, does she know how to do CPR if Fat Albert keels over from a massive coronary? And if not, will she bother to send his family a sympathy card?

I found myself thinking, “What reward could be worth subjecting yourself to this level of humiliation?” and for myself, I could only think of one: the opportunity to punch that smug, scrawny little rat queen Jillian Michaels right in the teeth.

Honestly, I didn’t think “reality” TV could be any worse than that. Clearly, I was sadly mistaken. “Fear Factor” sinks us to a new low. And, how shall we entertain the roaring masses when they’re bored with blood-diving for cow hearts? Are those lions I hear?