The other evening, I was watching an episode of “30 Rock” which is one of my favorites. It was the one where Jack (Alec Baldwin) sets Liz (Tina Fey) up with a blind date. Jack is really quite dumb but always hilarious, and he mistakenly thinks Liz is gay, or maybe he hopes she is, so the date he picks turns out to be a lesbian who is played by Stephanie March who used to be an A.D.A on Law Order: SVU until she went into the witness protection program. Actually, she was killed and then went into the program after she came back to life, but that has nothing to do with “30 Rock.” Anyway, Liz and her date meet in a bar and they both realize it’s a big misunderstanding, but they talk and find out they get along quite well. As the show progresses, they meet and talk and the things they talk about are what I think about. For instance: When you live alone, what if you die and no one knows until someone’s dog starts sniffing around? And what if something gets stuck in your throat and you can’t breathe or call 911 obviously . . . what then? It happened to me and I gave myself the Heimlich maneuver when I leaned over the sink, but that was just dumb luck. And what if by some fluke a couple Scientologists manage to get in and begin talking to you about the perils of seeing a psychiatrist since, as we were all told by Tom Cruise, they know the history of psychiatry and apparently think it’s all bullshit. How would you get rid of Scientologists? Does anyone know? Is there actually a way to do it? I just hope I never have to find out.

This morning I was going to the pharmacy and decided to check the expiration date on my aspirin that I keep in case of a heart attack. It said 2004! So I asked the pharmacist if it was any good anymore, and she slapped her forehead, grabbed my arm and said to get rid of it immediately! So I bought a new bottle that I will probably never use because I don’t plan to have a heart attack. I use the coated kind that would take forever to kick in – you could be dead and buried by then. But it’s here, just in case. So I got home and decided to open it. It wasn’t the “push down and turn to open” kind of cover. It was the one where you push up on a little thing on the cover. I couldn’t get it to budge and had to look around for a bottle opener to pry it off. Good thing I wasn’t having a heart attack then! I know they like to make pills so that kids can’t open them, but can anyone open them? In an instance such as this where I’m having a problem, I turn to “Seinfeld” and ask myself, “What would Jerry and Elaine do?” I never ask, “What would George and Kramer do?” as I don’t think I want to know what they’d do. I think some people ask “What would Jesus do?” but I always have good luck with Jerry and Elaine. I finally decided to dump out the old pills and put the new pills in the old bottle – the one I could open. Then I took the label off the new bottle and fastened it to the old bottle with the new expiration date. I think Jerry and Elaine would be proud.