triple antibiotic ointment

today at the store i thought we might need some neosporin. we have some western family triple antibiotic ointment, but i was pretty sure it had expired. and the official neosporin website says that you need to throw it away as soon as it expires and buy a new tube immediately. but who knows, they're probably just saying that to get people to buy more, right? doug assured me that it would still be okay. so, we got home, i looked at the tube, and realized it had indeed expired: 03/2004!

i'm no pharmacist but i'm pretty sure it's time for a new bottle. that was over 7 years ago. i was in the middle of my sophomore year at high school and not even old enough to date at that point. which got me thinking, where was i in march of 2004? thanks to technology, i can answer that question pretty accurately:

• i was on the jv tennis team but got bumped up and played on varsity regularly
• i took a german class with thomas, much to his dismay. eins, zwei, drei...
• i went to the ward rollerskating party
• i took my first english class from mr gardner
• i took emily cruisin' around town in the daylight hours

and a lot of other pointless stuff. then i thought to myself... if i could trace my internet presence back to march of 2004, maybe i could trace it back even further. like to the time i first logged onto the internet in 1997 when i was "8 Almost 9," (hence my aol screen name MarisaA89.) or maybe the A was because i was turning 9 in august... who knows. i probably log in about once a year just for the heck of it, and because it's fun to hear, "you've got mail!" i was devastated to find that everything was completely gone. deleted. nonexistent. empty. same with my tripod website with my favorite jack handey quotes. at least i still have access to the aol account, unlike the hotmail one that i got afterward to avoid the confusion (my last name doesn't start with an A and i wasn't born in 89, contrary to popular belief.) so i guess the moral is, nothing digital is permanent. not even the internet. even if you think something will be there forever, someday it will be gone.

to bring this full-circle, i guess a good rule of thumb is if you ever have an expired medical product and you're not sure if you can use it or not, see if you can track your internet presence back to the expiration date. if not, you should discard immediately.