Or MAYBE...She Just Had Shingles

Don't ever accuse me of not learning my lesson. I wasn't going to even risk the possibility of forgetting to share this gem with you freaks. See? I'm GROWING!

So I was waiting in the lobby at the dermatologist yesterday (don't ask, you don't want to know)((ok, fine - I was there so they could violently rip a part of my leg off))(((yes, a wart does TOO count as part of my leg))) for, like, an ETERNITY because they were running almost an hour behind schedule and hadn't bothered to let anyone know. The room was packed with mostly women, each impatiently paging through her tattered copy of Better Homes & Gardens, as if by finishing her magazine first she would somehow speed up the process of sitting with her thumb up her ass waiting her turn to be lanced or squeezed or drained or, in my case, numbed then sliced then soldered then flash-frozen.

A blond woman with the gigantic banana clip who sat in the chair next to me used the one free seat beside her as a personal book and smoothie holder since, rather than hold these items, she preferred to semi-force an old lady to hobble off in search of alternate ass-planting arrangements. But the smoothie? It was comfortable.

Meanwhile, a TV was broadcasting The Price Is Right (When the hell did Drew Carey get so fat!? And, Did they have to reinforce the stage??) until the top of the hour, at which time the local news station began their daily, late-morning broadcast with a 60 second blurb on the Michael Jackson memorial. They flashed images of Paris Jackson's eulogy, a tiny, sobbing white girl surrounded by the black cloud of the Jackson siblings, and then went on to other news.

That's when I noticed the blond beside me rise and go in search of tissues. When she turned to walk back to her seat, I saw that she. was. bawling. Pink-faced, snuffly nosed BAWLING HER EYES OUT AT THE DERMATOLOGIST'S OFFICE. The woman who wouldn't give up the seat she'd saved FOR HER BOOK was all broken up about the little people on the magic screen.

I glanced around and saw other women do double-takes as they took in blondie's uncomfortable reaction to the newscast, and then I saw them all quickly go back to reading about how to firm their bellies in 14 seconds without changing their diets or socks. It was, perhaps, the oddest thing I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of odd things before, things like midget wrestling and the underside of a chip-n-dale dancer's be-thonged package. This woman was publicly grieving for a dead celebrity, and it was a snotty sight to behold.

And now I have become a more compassionate, empathetic person because I realized that is how I must have looked a few years ago when, as I was shopping for bulk chicken breasts at Costco, I got the devastating phone call that my gynecologist could NOT call in a prescription for Ativan, or even Tylenol with codine, and that I would be forced to make the plane ride from Minnesota to California with nothing more than a handful of Benadryl, which everyone knows is like the white trash Valium, so in essence, my gynecologist was killing my pride, which explains why I was compelled to blow my nose into that butcher's apron and sprawl in aisle 12 with a case of Oreos.

Which, now that I think about it, may explain the source of my wart problem.