Things started to get interesting last week when I woke up in the middle of the night scratching my face. I was wishing and dreaming that I was wearing sandpaper mittens, but it wasn’t until the light of day that I realized the problem. Unfortunately it had not been a spider that feasted on my face, and as I inspected my swollen, lumpy visage, and reached for the hairbrush to scratch it, I realized the awful truth. I had poison ivy. That’s right, the lousy 30 minutes of productivity I had last weekend when I pulled a weed in my yard would have been better spent reading the dictionary so I might finally beat someone at “Words With Friends.”
But as every dark cloud has a silver lining, if I hadn’t been searching for an antihistamine, I might never have discovered that Charles had been stuck in our old bathroom with the warped door…all night long. Truth be told, I would have missed the little bugger….eventually. I still contend that on some subconscious level he was trying to re-enact the scene from “Tom Sawyer” when Tom is trapped in the cave, because he was supposedly in there for “privacy” when he was studying for that midterm. Plus he was way to nervous for any 13 year old, the way he was worried about suffocating. And because I can still hold out hope that my son will someday give a damn about literature. But let’s get back to me.
I desperately needed to find ways to keep my hands busy doing things other than scratching my face until the steroids started to kick in. Lucky for me I ran into my UPS man down on the highway and he flagged me down to deliver my iphone which has since kept me busy for countless hours. Logging in my contacts, which Charles told me I needed to do manually, took the better part of that first day. But I think he was just playing a mean trick on me. Like when I asked him to program the voice thingy to call me “Your Majesty” and instead it’s calling me “Turd Face.” Not funny, Charles, and just remember the next time you get stuck in the bathroom, don’t count on Turd Face to get you out.
You may have gleaned that technology and electronics are not my forte, so it won’t surprise you to know that I ran into a bit of a situation activating my phone. Somehow I activated it to Bianca’s number, without realizing. I have to admit, when that first sexy imessage came through, I was flattered. And a little turned on. Who says D.Parker isn’t a hotty? However, that excitement quickly evaporated into panic when the second one came through, and a third, and I realized they were not, after all, intended for me. I started freaking out because I didn’t know how to make them STOP! I picked up the house phone, hands shaking, my thumbs exhausted, and dialed Bianca to warn her, the hair on the back of my neck standing on end as I heard the “ding” signaling another imessage in the mailbox…and then the phone started to ring, and it was ME and I realized there was no way I could call Bianca! What kind of sick hell was this? Being stricken with the agonies of poison ivy wasn’t enough?
Thank god the woman at Verizon was able to straighten everything out, but not before the images of those hideous, sexy words meant for my innocent daughter were emblazoned on my mind’s eye forever. And no matter how hard I try to scratch my eyes out, I will never be rid of them. Whether I am wearing sandpaper mittens or not.
