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It shows you where I was in life last week when I forgot my own column, so because you shouldn’t be forced to go without my brand of wit and genius (cough), I thought I would run it on a Wednesday.

Remember when your parents would sit you down at the table and place something green, yellow or white in front of you for supper?

It, being a vegetable, would go with much tastier items like chicken, steak or pie, but all the same you were given an ultimatum: Finish everything or you don’t get dessert.

That’s the general feeling we’ve had throughout this pandemic and at this point it really doesn’t matter if I like vegetables by now or not.

For the record, I do like vegetables.

This whole entire thought process came to me when I found myself looking around the house for my mask, or any mask for that matter. I have three of them, but for some reason I couldn’t find any of them.

And just like your wallet, you notice these things when you are ready to leave the house and do a check of everything before leaving: keys, wallet, cellphone, mask … mask? MASK!!

This quickly became one of those small things that turns into a big thing as the level of red I start to see raises with each room I unsuccessfully found a mask.

It’s an easy fix really because we have disposable masks at work, but that’s not the point. Rather, it’s the principle of the matter. So I stormed through the house, failing to find one single mask in the entire house. So I gave up and angrily stormed from the house.

The sad reality is that one mask was in the pocket of the pants I wore earlier in the week and the other two were sitting on my desk at work, smugly waiting for me to find them when I shambled in already with gloomy thoughts for the day.

Which, as we can all attest I think, only served to make me more angry because they were so easy to find in the end.

It’s like when you were again younger and you searched the entirety of your room for that epic mix tape that encompassed every teenage emotion you had in regard to that one crush you had.

Angrily, you tramped about, throwing discarded clothes here and there and increasingly causing a larger stir until your mom, by now irritated by your spectacle, asked what you were looking for.

Angrily you snapped back, “Nothing!” This in turn earned you a scathingly glare until you whither and say, “My mix tape.”

Now, this may earn you a roll of the eyes. It kind of depends on your parentage, but ultimately these immortal words would be uttered, “If I go in there and find it …” Often the last part is left off as a silent threat to any number of possible punishments: shaming, tongue-lashing, grounding, more shaming.

But more importantly,  you knew what the result would be. Sherlock Holmes would walk in, cast her gaze around and inevitably find it, sitting in plain sight for all to see, including yourself who happened to spy it just as your mom’s eyes fell on it.

“Is this what you were looking for?” Your young mind frantically worked for a reason as to why you couldn’t find it but you were also stunted by the particular question of how did your mom find it so quickly. Aliens, Soviet spies, mom planted the evidence — all were possible excuses, but neither of them were very good and so you simply mumbled, “Yes.”

Well, that’s how the mask went, except there was no one to point out the obvious and so I lived with my shame privately.

This is what the pandemic has done to us. We’re edgy and stressed and tired of masks. No doubt we, the vaccinated, are happy to not be wearing them. Believe me, I get it and all three of my masks are pretty cool. One makes me look like I’m straight out of a science fiction movie … but that’s not the point. We’re tired of losing them, finding them, wearing them.

Not to mention I’ve eaten more quinoa than I  ever had during the pandemic and as I told  Danielle Nesvold not long ago, as a rule I don’t like foods I don’t know how to spell … and I now know how to spell quinoa!

What’s the world coming too … and where is my MASK?! I swear, if I walk in there ….