They had it coming

I went to high school with a girl (let's call her 'Jane') whose mother was a very prominent politician. Jane and I both played basketball, though on different teams. One Wednesday night after my game had finished, I was bullied into refereeing Jane's game. I'd never refereed before and I tried desperately to beg off, because although I had been playing for four seasons, I didn't exactly understand the rules of basketball. Also, I'm afraid of whistles.

My pleas were ignored and I was practically shoved onto the court. It was a disaster from start to finish, and my bumbling and total incompetence as a referee wasn't helped by the abuse being hurled at me from the sidelines by the coaches and players' parents, with Jane's mother being the ringleader.

By the time second quarter rolled around, someone had located a more capable ref and I was thankfully demoted to scoreboard operator. Unfortunately, the verbal abuse didn't abate there and shrill Mrs Jane continued to repeatedly heckle and berate me at volume for not getting the scores up on the board quickly enough.

I spent the remainder of my high school career loathing the vile woman for her role in my public humiliation. It was something I expressed in my own passive aggressive way -- I would often scowl enthusiastically at her portrait which hung amongst pictures of other notable alumni in the school hallway. And that seemed satisfying enough, because I had no idea that something else was out there exacting my revenge for me.

About a year after I graduated high school, I was in my car listening to the radio when I heard on the news that Mrs Jane had been very abruptly ousted from her political position in an embarrassing landslide defeat.
I'm not proud of it now, but I may have yelled, "Yes! In your face!" at the radio. I also may have clasped my hands together and pumped them above my head in a primal display of victory. Justice truly had been served.

In the (admittedly small) portion of my brain that is rational, I knew that my short lived stint as a referee and her political downfall were two completely separate, unrelated events. In the larger, more fanciful portion of my brain, the latter was a direct result of the former and I for one was delighted that the universe had my back and karma was out there kicking ass for me.

Although my sense of justice is definitely disproportionate, I'm not a complete asshole. My schadenfreude for Mrs Jane fizzled out during her messy public divorce some years later. When I recently read in the newspaper that she had lost a bit of money in something resembling a Nigerian scam, I just felt pity. But how do you tell karma, "It's cool, I'm not mad anymore, find someone else to pick on,"?

* * *

This morning, I was walking to work on a narrow footpath. I sped up and drifted to the right to overtake the person walking in front of me, when a jogger came up behind me and barked "MOVE!" before elbowing me out of the way.

He's going down.

"I bumped my lip on a biscuit. It's not a cold sore!"

On Friday night I was dismayed to find that one of my many* gentleman callers has left his calling card in the form of a disfiguring cold sore on my bottom lip.

I'm not the type of person to let a ragin' case of the herpes ruin my weekend, so I decided to go online to seek advice from the internet doctor.

The first site I stumbled upon was this one, a collection of user-submitted home remedies for cold sores. You guys, there is a reason why laypeople are not allowed to dispense medical advice and this site is it.

Among the various cold sore cures that this site suggests, the one that comes up time and time again is ear wax. Ear wax! So I suppose one should just swivel their pinky around in there for a while and smear the results on their lips? Eww! How am I supposed to kiss my (*)husband with those nasty wax encrusted lips? That's gross.

Another contributor to the site offered a ten-step plan to getting rid of a cold sore overnight. I have to admit that I skimmed most of it, until step 7 which gave instructions for applying nail polish remover to the cold sore as follows:

"Imagine that you are an archeologist and you are using some acid to clear some stubborn fossilised mud off a priceless gold medallion."

WHAT? Why?

"This makes the process quite fun."

But it stings!

"I don't care if it stings, just think about how much money you'll make once you sell that medallion to the museum of natural history!"

I think it's fair to say that this is the point that I left that website.

Spent the entire weekend indoors as a social pariah so I could ride out the cold sore. Woke up for work today and it still hasn't diminished. On the plus side, it gave Gerald something new to stare at at work this morning (as he stared, I could practically hear him thinking that I must be one of those Bad Women With Loose Morals, the type that his mother warned him about).

So I just wrote an entire entry about a cold sore. Sorry, you guys. I'm at rock bottom for material. Maybe that ear wax isn't such a bad idea...



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