You want me to do what?

I have waved the flag of surrender at my ears and sinuses and went to an ENT specialist yesterday. I knew I was in trouble when he stuck a mirror into my throat and said, “My goodness, is your right tonsil always this large?” Ummm, is that bad?

He looked in my ears and said, “You use Q-tips on your ears, don’t you?”

“Well, sure, isn’t that what God made Q-tips for?”

“Haven’t you ever heard the saying, ‘Don’t put anything larger than your elbow into your ear’?”

“I don’t think my elbow is going to get my ear very clean.”

“Your ears are self-cleaning. You just wipe the outside of them with a towel. Those Q-tips are like a ramrod pounding everything against your eardrum. We’re going to have to clean out your ears.”

“I’ve been told that before!”

While he went to get some instruments, I surreptitiously tried to put my elbow in my ear and concluded I’d have to be a contortionist or a master of yoga to perform such an act.

The he made me lie down so he could clean out my ears and I immediately swore off Q-tips forever. Tears came to my eyes as I promised to go home and burn every cotton swab in my house. I believe I was howling, Sweet Caesar, I swear I’ll never use a Q-tip again as long as you STOP WITH THE SCRAPING!

He said, “This is pretty disgusting stuff. I won’t show you what I’m taking out of your ears.” Which proved that he didn’t know me at all, because unless he pulled a worm out of my ear I wanted to see what it was. Besides, if he had scooped an eardrum out with all that scraping I wanted him to put it back immediately. And man oh man. There was Q-tip debris in there. And other stuff.

So I’m serving as a terrible warning to you. Don’t Q-tip yourself. Just don’t.

After this, we did a hearing test and I could hear everything from the angels singing to the song of the whales in the depths of the ocean. I have completely normal hearing. Which proves that the problem really is Joe mumbling, after all.

Then it was on to the sinuses. Along with a new course of antibiotics, the doctor wants me to start rinsing my sinuses. That sounded just fine until he started mentioning neti pots and the practice of yoga masters (yogis? yogists?), and I had to stop and say, mister, if it requires yoga I guarantee you I am not going to be able to do this; how clean do these sinuses really need to be, anyway?

He callously brushed off my concerns. You’ll get used to it, he insisted. So here’s what I have to do everyday. I lean over the sink with a squirt bottle of warm saline water, and when I squirt it up through one nostril, it rinses the sinuses, races directly through my frontal lobe and then flows out the other nostril. Auuuugggghhh. Somehow this is good for me.

Appliance Graveyard

I find myself almost entirely unable to function today. Why, you may ask? No, it’s not further sickness or the antics of those goshdarn cute teenagers. It’s because my house has become the appliance graveyard.

The body count so far is a humidifier (that I truly need in order to breathe air on this planet), a microwave (more on that later), and a coffeemaker that expired just moments before. Add to that my washing machine that is on life support and is just a spin cycle away from flat-lining, and gosh…I don’t even want to know what else is going wrong.

We’re obviously killing our appliances. We’re the Dr. Kevorkians of suburbia. Who would have ever known that repeatedly cooking potatoes in a microwave would cause total system failure? Well, we’ve learned. We know now.

I hate to complain about the lack of appliances since most of the world has…I don’t know…two pots and a dung fire. I grew up out in the country and we didn’t even have air conditioning or cable TV. And yet, my gosh, how spoiled I’ve become by a microwave. Pathetic as it sounds, I’m having to fire up rusty old memory cells to remember how to make a cup of tea without a microwave. Lunch today…hmmm…what’s the best way to heat up leftovers without a microwave? You mean I have to use a pan before dinnertime? Ack!

I see I’ve super-evolved into a suburbanite without survivalist skills. Drop me into a Chinese village and I would expire. Good thing I’ve still got my stove. Just be careful about bringing any of your own appliances to my house. This IS where old washers go to die, after all.

Seven Christmasy Things

Damama tagged me for a meme so long ago that I think she even forgot that I’d do it – but no! I’ve not forgotten! I don’t mind telling you seven personal, very weird things about myself. But because of the snowstorm here in Chicagoland and my desire to be a rebel in all things, I’ve decided to make them Christmasy things. Ready?

1. When I was a kid, my mom took tree tinseling very seriously. None of the rest of us were allowed to put tinsel on the tree because we did not place one careful strand on each and every pine needle. It took her hours.

One Christmas when I was a teenager, she and I got into an argument about chores. She banished me to the living room to vacuum the carpet. Instead, I vacuumed all the tinsel off one side of the tree. Then she caught me.

2. The second best gift I’ve ever received actually wasn’t a Christmas present. It was a bottle of luxurious passion fruit body lotion that a co-worker gave me as a baby shower gift. Why was it so memorable? We were terribly, grindingly dirt poor and that gift was the one thing that reminded me I was still a woman. Still brings tears to my eyes to think of it.

3. The worst gift I ever gave someone was during the period mentioned above. I gave my sister and her boyfriend a TV that only needed a picture tube in order to work. At the time, being a silly twenty-year-old, I imagined that I was giving her a real TV! That only needed some minor work! But in retrospect I realize, no, I gave someone a broken TV. That’s pretty lame.

4. When I was a very small child celebrating Christmas at my Grandpa RB’s house, my older sister convinced me to sneak downstairs with her to see if Santa was real. Everyone was asleep. We actually saw some man down there by the Christmas tree and he did not look like our Grandpa (who was distinctly un-Santalike) or anyone else we knew. We ran right back up the stairs and I don’t think we ever asked anyone about it.

5. My worst Christmas ever was about ten years ago when I was a single mom. My girls were spending the day with their dad and I lived to far from my family to travel there. I invited my recently-divorced friend to spend the day with me and we went to the movies and ate Kung Pao Chicken at our favorite Chinese restaurant. When she went home, I spent the evening in internet chat rooms just looking for someone to talk to. The next year, my friend Natasha gave me a blown glass ornament shaped like a red pepper to remember our Christmas by.

6. My favorite Christmas memory is of the Christmas Eve services at our church. I’ve felt so much peace in singing “Silent Night” with all my friends and my daughters, lighting one candle from another, and looking out into the cold, dark night with our little lights.

7. I received my best Christmas present ever before Christmas Day, December 20, 2004, when Big Guy asked me to marry him. In the Renaissance Gallery of the Art Institute of Chicago. In Italian.

Since I didn’t know any Italian, I just stared kind of blankly at him until he offered to translate, and then got down on one knee. And BG says I took a very long time to answer him.

I’m going back over to Damama’s to tell her I’ve kept my promise and wrote my meme. Want to join in the fun? Please either post a Christmasy meme on your site or respond to these 7 items in my comments. I look forward to hearing from you!