Category Archives: humor

The Great Linguini Divot

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Dan is not a doctor.(1) But once he did take a scalpel to my tender flesh and excise a horror I had lived with for years.

Here’s how it happened: I had a recurring cyst that would appear on my torso from time to time, like a giant zit that just wandered off to be alone. Swollen, bright red, tight skin, pain – the whole works. Usually it went away after a few days.(2)

But it always came back. The timing was random, but the zit was not.

A friend saw it when we were changing clothes to go out. She didn’t take it seriously, though, so I told her that I had been to the doctor, who diagnosed it as “polymammia,” which meant I was growing a third breast.(3) It fooled her for a moment. But just a moment. A brief one.

Eventually, it bothered me enough to really see a doctor. He never said a word about “polymammia,”(4) but called it a recurring cyst. “Come back in a couple of days and I’ll lance it,” he said.

So I did. He looked at it and poked at it with a (gloved) finger and said, “It’s not ready yet.”

“You mean it’s not ripe?” I said. “Couldn’t you at least try to lance it? It hurts a lot.”

He allowed as how he could try. And did. And found a pocket of pus lurking underneath. “Wow! That must have hurt!” he said.

I gave him the sideways squint.

“Not that I didn’t believe you,” he stammered. Then he changed the subject. “Let’s put a drain in there.”

Here’s where the linguini enters the story.(5)

I had never had anything on or in my body drained before, so I thought maybe he would draw out the gunk with a hypodermic or at least take a tiny rubber hose and stick it into the cyst so the pus would just run out.

But no. It turns out a “drain” is an object that looks like a piece of knit linguini. He stuffed it in there and bandaged it and it healed nicely (after bleeding through the bandage and my shirt for a while).

Some time later, though, I noticed a slightly raised black dot, about the size of the roller from a roller ball pen, where the cyst used to be. Oh great, I thought. I’ve exchanged a wandering zit for a wandering blackhead.

The darned thing itched at times. It looked like I could squeeze it like the blackhead it resembled, or if I could get my fingernails under it, it would pop right out. I never could manage it, though, perhaps because I bite my fingernails off and spit them across the room as soon as they grow an eighth of an inch.(6)

Here’s where my husband and the scalpel come in. To be truthful, it wasn’t a scalpel. It was an Exacto knife. He sterilized it with flame and alcohol, and swabbed all around the blackhead with more alcohol. Then, since we were both just a wee bit nervous, we both applied even more alcohol(7). Internally.

Wielding the Exacto with surprising delicacy, given the size of his bear-like paws, Dan cut around the blackhead and began to lift it out.

It kept coming. This alarmed us both.

When the Thing was finally extracted, it proved to be several inches of drain, wadded up and solid. The doctor had neglected to remove all of it, the blood had dried and turned it black(8), and there it had resided in my torso for several years.

We goggled at it for a moment, then applied more alcohol(9), and slapped a Band-aid on it. I never heard from it again.(10)

Dan had thought that the skin would heal over smoothly, without a trace. And it did. Mostly. There was no scar, just a teeny little roller-ball-pen-ball-sized depression where first the cyst, then the linguini had been. A linguini divot, if you will.

Which I have to this day. Viewings by appointment only.

(1) Nor does he play one on TV. He has been a medical orderly, back when that job existed. Now he’s just disorderly.
(2) Or wandered off again to someplace or someone else where it didn’t bother me.
(3) I don’t think there is a medical term for growing a third breast. If there isn’t, I would like to suggest “polymammia.”
(4) Which, now that I think about it is a Good Thing. I would have had to throw out all my bras and get new ones custom-made. I assume that’s expensive. Plus I’d probably have to send a picture of the third breast* to the manufacturer and it would be leaked to the Internet, go viral, and I could never be on the Supreme Court.
*I was once presented a serving of shepherd’s pie that had three scoops of mashed potato on top. Guess what it looked like.**
**Three breasts, that’s what. Stay with me here, people.
(5) You were wondering, weren’t you? I can tell.
(6) I grew them out exactly once, for my wedding. The salon used a nail color called “Pepperoni,” which was probably the only time they used it for a wedding manicure.
(7) Rum.
(8) Cooking tip: If your linguini turns hard and black, it’s overdone.
(9) Both kinds.
(10) For all I know, Dan may have kept it. He always wants the scans from our colonoscopies and the time they took pictures inside my bladder. He wanted to keep his own appendix, but they wouldn’t let him. Unless it’s that thing in the back of the freezer. I don’t really want to know.

Butt Check

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Ah! Remember the good old days when you were just potty-trained and as you marched out of the bathroom, having proudly done your duty, your mother was waiting to tell you to pull down your pants and prepare for butt inspection?

Me neither.

But apparently that’s the way it is with bears. God forbid that a young bear-child should have shreds of toilet paper clinging to its ass.(1)

At first the commercials were cute – using the old rhetorical question about bears and their excretory functions.(2) Ha ha. Very amusing.

But now they’ve gone too far. The you-don’t-have-to-use-a-lot-of-paper commercial was OK. Instructive in its way, and a lesson every young bear needs to learn. But enough is enough. We don’t need to know about bear butt checks.(3)

And we especially don’t need to know about bears and SKID MARKS. That’s right, the next commercial in the series was about how this miracle toilet tissue could prevent skid marks in one’s underwear.(4)

Never mind that bears do not generally wear pants and have never been depicted in the commercials wearing pants. Without pants, how can they have underpants? And without underpants, how can they have skid marks?

Now we’re in the realm of not just butt checks, but underwear inspection. I mean, ick. Think about it, bear skid marks would be HUGE.(5)

Of course that’s not the only disturbing commercial out there. My husband hates the ones in which sentient cereal squares eat other sentient cereal squares. Maybe that’s just him. We both hate the one where the guy has been in an auto accident and his mother appears, waiting on the phone with the insurance company. He says, “You’re not helping.” Hey, dipwad, at least she’s trying, instead of standing there making up dopey magic jingles. And she’s your mother – show some respect!

At this point I could go into a rant about how advertising agencies are incapable of making commercials without making someone look idiotic and helpless. It used to be women who were stupid and needed to be rescued by the über-masculine Mr. Clean. Then men got to be incompetent, with women bailing them out from assorted domestic dilemmas. Now the trend is for all adults to be complete imbeciles with children who must save them from technological and other disasters.(6) Even talking babies with investment advice. As if someone who hasn’t even graduated to skid-mark-able underpants should be trusted with our financial future!

But you can certainly fill in the blanks with your own least favorite commercials.

Just don’t get me started on how commercials try to deceive us, and often succeed.(7) We’ll be here all night, instead of drifting off to sleep with visions of bear asses, uh, dancing in our heads.(8)

(1) Obviously, bears don’t have to pull down their pants. That would be ridiculous.

(2) Oh, come on. You know the one I mean.

(3) You have no idea how hard it’s been writing this without dipping into the possibilities of puns involving bear/bare and but/butt. And duty/doody, for that matter. Now that I think about it, I could have probably worked “cheeky” in there somewhere.

(4) We all know what we’re talking about, right? We don’t? How shall I put this delicately? Streaks made by a substance of a certain dark color.

(5) Or don’t think about it. You’ll be happier. Except now that I’ve mentioned it, you’re thinking about it RIGHT NOW, aren’t you? See how I did that? Ah, the power of authorship. Tee-hee.

(6) Though not skid marks. Yet.

(7) You know what “virtually painless” means? NOT PAINLESS!

(8) You’re welcome.

Light Crumbs and Muffin Bones

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A woman told a joke and I collapsed in hysterics before she even got to the punchline. Here’s the set-up:

Why did the man have a hundred-dollar bill tattooed on his wing-wing?

That’s when I lost it.(1)

I found out later that she called a woman’s genitals her “tutu.” Which no doubt confused her kids the first time they saw a ballet.

Almost every family, and many politicians and pundits, have trouble calling things by their right names. So we have “lady parts” and “va-jay-jays” and “junk.” Even “uterus” was too shocking for the Florida State Legislature, which reprimanded a member for letting such a word fall on delicate ears, “particularly [those of] the young pages and messengers who are seated in the chamber during debates.”(2)

But every family also has unique words and phrases that enter their vocabulary and stay there, though not for fear of giving offense. They’re just things that no outsider understands.

Some of these terms are created by children and have no equivalent in adult language. One little girl said she wanted an Easter hat with a “go-down.” “You’ll have to show me one,” her mother said. Turns out a go-down was a ribbon that dangled down the back.

Another child invented “move-down” for that moment during a meal when you’re not completely full but need your stomach contents to settle a bit. My husband and I have adopted that one. It’s just so darn useful. “Are you through?” “No, just having a move-down.”

Here’s a good example of one of our neologisms(3): Light crumbs. Dan works nights and hates to leave lights on because of the power bills. I, on the other hand, can’t find my way upstairs without light. I can’t even get from the sofa to the switch by the stairs. If I get up the stairs, I can’t make it to the switch in the bathroom. If I get that far, I can’t make it to my bedside lamp. I have balance problems and walking in the dark makes me dizzy. Plus we have a cat whose nickname is “Mr. Underfoot.”

So Dan leaves a trail of light crumbs for me to follow like a vision-impaired Hansel and/or Gretel. Instead of turning them on as I reach them, I turn them off as I pass them. It’s less doofy than hanging a flashlight around my neck, more agreeable than sending the power company more than absolutely necessary, and easier on Garcia’s tail. Win, win, win.

Many of our personal vocabulary items have to do with food. Here are a few, with definitions.

Muffin bones. When you eat ribs, you usually have a side plate for the bones. When my husband was doing the low-carb thing, he wouldn’t eat pizza crusts. He would put them aside, and they became pizza bones. Similarly, the empty, sticky, crumby fluted paper cups that hold muffins are muffin bones.

Tuna juice. No, we don’t put fish through a juicer.(4) Tuna juice is the water that tuna packed in water is packed in. Cats love it, either straight up or mixed with their regular food.

Not-flan. I had a recipe for a sweet baked good involving pastry crust, eggs, cream cheese, sugar, and optional fruit topping. My husband kept calling it “flan.” I told him that wasn’t the thing’s name. “What is it then?” he demanded. I was stumped. “Well, not flan!” I replied. Ever since that has been our name for it. Later, after I thought it over, “Way-Too-Big Cheese Danish” would have been more accurate. But by then it was too late.(5)

Cat-related activities are good sources for invented words too. Here are some of ours:

Cat fit. Also known as “the Crazy Hour,” this is when cats race around the house for no apparent reason, as if the devil himself were after them.(6)

Bag mice. Those things that make the rustling noise inside either paper or plastic, that cats must protect their owners from. I was pleased to learn that this phenomenon must be universal, as once in Dubrovnik, a black catten(7) detected bag mice in our souvenir bag. (It’s also possible that it just wanted to sneak into the U.S.)

Kitty burrito. Not a food item, but what you must make in order to give a cat pills, fluids, eye drops, or other indignities. Swaddling in a towel is traditional, but we find that dropping the cat in a pillowcase and then doing the burrito folds makes it harder for the patient to squirm loose.

I have not trademarked or copyrighted any of these words or phrases. Feel free to use them if you wish. And if you’d like to share some of your most useful invented vocabulary items with readers of this blog, please do. But please, no euphemisms or slang terms for penis and vagina. We already have way too many of those.

(1) If you are the one person in the world who’s never heard it, the punchline is: Because he heard how women love to blow money.

(2) Pages and messengers range in age from 12-18. I envision an 18-year-old asking, “Mommy, what’s a uterus?”

(3) Look it up.

(4) Or cook them in the dishwasher, which apparently is a thing.

(5) This was also not during Dan’s low-carb phase.

(6) Once Maggie got her back paw tangled in a plastic shopping bag, got scared, and was chased up the stairs by a recently purchased videotape of An American in Paris, which is not exactly the devil, but pretty alarming anyway. Because no matter how fast you run, it’s still always Right There Behind You.

(7) Not a kitten, but not full-grown; a teen-ager.

Moonshine Fantasy

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Watching Chopped on Food Network, I noticed that all the baskets contained some kind of moonshine and that the guest judge was from Outback Steakhouse.

Math may not have been my best subject, but I can put one and one together and usually come within spitting distance of two or thereabouts. I said to myself, “Self, I bet Outback is having some kind of moonshine promotion.”

I was right. Within a couple of days I began seeing the commercials. I have also seen “moonshine” for sale in the liquor stores. This is just wrong. The wrongness of it rattled around in my brain and caused this vision.

Me [in Outback Steakhouse]: Any specials today?

Server [perkily]: Why, yes! We’re featuring our new Moonshine Entrees!

Me: Tell me about them.

Server [still perky]: Each of our superb meats has been infused with the authentic flavor of moonshine!

Me: You mean it tastes like airplane glue and smells like kerosene?

Server [puzzled]: Why, no! It’s a sweet rich flavor that enhances all our dishes.

Me: So where do you get your moonshine?

Server [resuming perkiness]: It comes from our warehouse on the weekly truck so you now that every batch is fresh!

Me: Yeah, that’s about how long my uncle used to age his. But he kept it under the corn crib instead of in a warehouse.

Server [still trying]: We make sure the quality is consistent and always imparts that special moonshine kick!

Me [impressed]: So you know that it always causes the jake-leg wobbles and the blind staggers?

Server [beginning to fold]: Really, I don’t think…

Me: Yeah, that’s the other good thing about moonshine. After your kidneys shut down, it goes to your head and you can’t think.

Server [losing it]: Perhaps you should see the manager.

Me: If I can still see her, it ain’t the best moonshine.

Server [nearing tears]: It’s really nothing like that!

Me: Then you’re obviously not using my uncle’s recipe. It was a big hit at all the family reunions. He’d get plumb crazy and start firing off his single-shot rifle. Gives a person a sporting chance. Not like those AR-15s everyone has nowadays. Tell me, is this an open carry state?

Server flees, returning with the manager, who gives me a coupon for a free dinner. At the Olive Garden.

Of course, I wouldn’t really do any such thing. For one thing, it would be mean, and for another I can’t really afford to eat at Outback. And of course the dialogue probably wouldn’t go as I imagined. And I’d be thrown out on one of my ears.

But still…

Mammograms – Why?

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I had a mammogram today and it raised questions in my mind. Not about whether mammograms are a good thing, despite the new study in the British Medical Journal that said they don’t really help. My mother had breast cancer and a mastectomy. She survived. A dear friend had a lumpectomy. (Digression: By accident, it almost became a complete boobectomy. Her breast survived.)

When my doctor told me to schedule the test, I  admitted to him that I don’t do the breast self-exam thing every month. I told him I couldn’t feel anything out of the ordinary, not even after another doctor gave me the fake boob with the different sized lumps to practice on. “My breasts are weird and lumpy,” I told him. “All women’s breasts are weird and lumpy,” he replied. Good to know. And, yes, there have been plenty of volunteers who’ve offered to help. So don’t even go there.

I dutifully scheduled the test, especially since I think that now, thanks to the ACA, insurance has to pay for the whole thing. (Further digression: The thing that caused the most resistance to the ACA, in my opinion, was letting its opponents get away with calling it “Obamacare.” That and not emphasizing that it wasn’t health care reform, which scares people. It was insurance reform, which only scares insurance companies.)

(I think I was working up to making a point somewhere. What was it? Oh, yeah, mammograms. Questions. That was it.) My questions were not about the actual test, but about the process.

When I entered the elaborate medical photo booth, the tech asked me, as usual, to remove my clothing above the waist and put on a cloth gown with the opening in the front. She told me to open the door a bit when I was ready.

Leave me alone with nothing to read and I start thinking.

I said to myself, “Self, why does she want me to put on that extremely fashionable gown when she’s going to see my weird, lumpy breasts anyway?”

When I discussed this with my husband later, he said that some people are modest.

“About what?” I asked. “They know the tech is going to see their boobs.”

I thought some more. “When the mammogrammers snap the pics, the techs ask you to uncover one breast at a time. Why is that? Are modest people okay with exposing one boob to a stranger, but not two at once? Plus, the tech touches them. If they’re going to be modest, isn’t that the bigger issue?”

I was on a roll. “And that whole leaving the room while I change is silly. They could save time – and laundry bills for the gowns – if they just said, ‘Strip to the waist and stick ’em in the machine.’

“They should reserve that delicate sensibility crap for first-timers. Everyone else just wants to get it over with as quickly as possible. Am I right?”

My husband said he didn’t know, which is probably true, since he’s never had a mammogram.

So, what’s the take-away here?

When I have a mammogram, I already know that someone will see and touch my breasts. And I’m okay with that.

But if I see my pictures on the Internet, I’ll really be pissed.

UPDATE (IRONY ALERT)

The mammogram I was so flippant about revealed a cyst, which has gotten larger. Tuesday I go for a follow-up mammogram and ultrasound. Even more people will see my breasts, and I’m still OK with that.