What do you do when a primitive( not a kanji) just completely is ****ing you up?

Sorry for the bad language, but I just feel terrible. I got to Lesson 25 the other day and for some reason, no matter what, the primitive "outhouse" will not come to my mind.

First of all it is built from nothing related to outhouses. The top of 'study' and 'mouth' does not = outhouse.

Moreover, every single Kanji that included this Kanji, I failed on RtK. I literally came to a blank mind each time one of them popped up. And when I flipped them, the story didn't even come to me. Not only that but 'outhouse' has very little to do with the Kanji keywords or meanings.

Why did Heisig do this to me?

What can I do about it?

The usual: find the closest variant for your mind. Etymology, form, association...
For example for outhouse, you know they all have a hole on the door in the classic depiction, so I picture "little" + "house" (actually it's "crown", but little + crown make a sort of variant of house) + mouth (which is also orifice -- for the little hole).

Anyway you'll get more souple at this as you'll get going. Heisig did this because concrete, visual stuff is more easy to learn than the actual abstract meaning of the primitive. In worst cases, you can also devise your own primitive-keyword. As difficult primitives are used max 5 times (vs radicals than can be used more than 60 times (average 30)), it's not a big load on the memory, and because it's your own, you'll remember it better.
Good luck!

The "outhouse" primitive is more like "little monk" 尚. How about instead of outhouse you use, umm, Bilbo Baggins who sort of reminds me of that. Of course, Mini-me or any other memorable small guy can work.

As always, I find it easier when characters can represent primitives.

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I think I'll try hard repetition as it seems to have worked so well for the rest of the stuff that maybe it'll even overcome this.

I've never had that much trouble with a whole primitive before - I mean, yeah I had problem Kanjis that solved themselves through reps but primitives? That show up in 10+ Kanji? Well, I'm going to try and see what I can do. Thanks for the support!

Also: I lol'd at Mini-me. Now that image will be in my mind forever... perfect!