…and then the shoelaces tied themselves around a bird and then 5,000 spoons came out of nowhere and then I woke up.

I have poison ivy. It’s between my fingers, in my collarbone, lining my bikini area (don’t ask) and swarming my ankles. It feels like my skin is trying to crawl off my bones while angsty fire ants puke into my pores. But poison ivy is a weird thing to have. It’s Bubonic plague-ish in that you don’t really hear about it much. Yet it’s not contagious or weird enough for anybody to be interested in it. You can’t really see it on my skin. It’s boring. All it does is make me itch. And nobody really cares about whether you’re itching.

I have an itch.

See? Boring.

Telling people you have poison ivy is like telling them about your dreams. Listening to the average dream conversation: Oh my god. I had this crazy dream where I was on this rainbow and then this eagle came and there was a sea of shoelaces and bla bla bla bla bla.

Sorry, avid dream tellers. You’ve heard it here first: Nobody cares about your shoelaces.

I know poison ivy falls in the dream category because my mom gets poison ivy every year. It usually sounds like “I have poison ivy and it itches so much and bla bla bla bla.” If only it caused blindness or a deformation, then I might care. Instead of treating her with compassion, I’ve often thought, ‘What an idiot. How can she get poison ivy again?’ Apparently, it’s really easy. You can actually get the itch just by walking by the plant. It grows in our backyard, and our plants wear costumes so they don’t look like the average poisonous perpetrator.

So, I have poison ivy and it itches and bla bla bla.

My friend says he plays a game with his friends. They try to top each other with boring personal information.

I need a car wash.
I have a hang nail.
I just ate an apple.
I bought a pair of pants.
I am trying a new brand of milk.
I like spaghetti.

I had a dream.
I have an itch.

Snooze.

I have a theory about these tidbits. I don’t think they were always so unimportant. Remember in Wuthering Heights (I can’t believe I’m referencing Wuthering Heights again. I really hated that book.) when they’re stuck in the winter and their lives were so boring because it was 1845 and they didn’t have internet or skinny jeans? They could talk about a hang nail for hours because what else were they going to do? Now, our brains are so used to taking important calls on our mobile phones and buying shoes online and wishing to win the Publishers’ Clearing House and weighing the pros and cons of showering.

A hang nail has a lot of competition.

By ignoring these personal tidbits, we’re making people feel unheard and therefore encouraging them to exaggerate or do anything for attention like be on Reality TV or be Lady Gaga. Our mundane-rendering is the very reason Lady Gaga wears meat. She tried to tell her friends once that she burned the roof of her mouth, and they didn’t bat an eye until she skinned twelve squirrels and hung them from her nipples.  My stance on this topic is that our decision to ignore our friends’ poison ivies is leading to attention-whoring. The good part is that we have the power to stop it. Let’s make the boring important again. Let’s tell the world we went to Target today or opened the upstairs bedroom window or cried for hours about being single.

We have the power to to change the world by simply caring about hang nails. I swear. This is not just a plea for sympathy for my poison-filled pores. It’s a revolt.

Tell me, friends: What is your mundane? Tell me, and I will do my best to pretend that I care.