It occurs to me that you might be wondering how I burned my tuvalee.
So the weekend.
Esteban and I decided to have a quiet evening at home on Friday night, replete with my new Clerks DVD and ordered in Chinese food. I ordered a shrimp egg roll and some steamed dumplings. Esteban ordered Sweet and Sour Chicken.
I rushed around picking up stuff in the living room. I hate sitting in a messy living room. I can’t relax in clutter. Our food came and we popped the DVD in. Esteban only wanted the fried chicken chunks from his dinner, so I bogarted his steaming hot pint of red sweet and sour sauce to dunk my egg roll into. We bunkered down, looking forward to a lovely evening of slackerdom, happily munching our takeout.
I was holding the sweet and sour sauce and dipping my egg roll into it when all of the sudden, I goofed and spilled some on my hand. Holy shit! It was so hot! I tried to balance the container on my leg (which was stupid) while I reached for the napkin on the table beside me. The container tipped inward and then spilled all over my legs.
Hot. White hot pain. As the sticky sauce seeped through my pants, it burned even worse. I grabbed the container, completely covering my hand with the red sauce. I made a little gasp and Esteban started to say “What’s wrong! What’s wrong? What? What?” I thought that I had told him “I burned myself on your mickey ficky sweet and sour sauce because I am a complete tool!” but instead I was apparently using my superior powers of telepathy. Esteban reports that I made no sounds whatsoever. I merely got up from the recliner and yanked off my pants, including panties. Esteban then saw all of the red and thought that perhaps I was having an embolism or some sort of blood related plague. He was very concerned that I was dropping trou in the living room, in front of the very large window and the front door which was wide open. Fortunately, I wasn’t bare assed in public for very long because I ran into the bathroom to was the red sauce off my hand. It clung like hot glue, continuing to burn as I ran through the house. Esteban followed me and I explained what had happened. Then I sat there with a cold towel on my legs, which had turned a lovely shade of scarlet (due mostly to the color of the sauce, although I did have first degree burns). Later, I stripped fully and attired in my boxer shorts and a purple t-shirt which matched the purple flowers on my boxer shorts (because even in times of crisis, one must still consider matching). Esteban had mostly cleaned up the red splotches throughout the living room and then he started to laugh at me because it was so very strange, seeing me all freaking out. The worst thing about it was that the entire time that I was stripping my soaked scalding pants off, I kept thinking “This is karma. This is all karma for the time that I laughed at the old lady who burned her crotch with McDonald’s coffee and then sued them and now they have the warning label on all the beverage containers which say Warning: This Product May Burn Your Groin. This is dire painful karma.”
So, anyway, that’s how I burned my cooter. Being an evil person. Not because I’m a tool who doesn’t know how to eat a damn shrimp egg roll without somehow damaging their person.
Sadly, this whole thing puts everything into perspective. I thought the ass splinter was the most humiliating injury I could inflict upon myself, but I was so mistaken. It can always get worse.
I spent the evening on the sofa, with an ice pack on my legs, another in my hand (which actually had the most damage, having had prolonged contact with the liquid.) I had first degree burns… basically a really really bad sunburn. I had expected to see blisters, but I lucked out. The amazing thing was that the freaking sweet and sour sauce had been so god awful hot. It must have been nuclear when it left the restaurant.
Needless to say, I no longer craved Chinese food. I ate 12 Oreos for dinner. Oreos never hurt anyone.
Other than searing pain, the evening was lovely. I took a bunch of Advil and then we retired to bed rather early, Esteban bemoaning the fact that the burned netheregions likely meant that it would be awhile before we would be having the Hot Sex. Luckily for him, the burns had more or less subsided by morning, with my hand looking a little angry, but no worse for the wear.
In the morning, we had a huge plan for the day. Esteban wanted to work outside on the yard, mowing and raking and whatnot. My goal was “improvement” and I cared not what. I just wanted to have a sense of completion on something or other, be it laundry, the yard, or the living quarters. We didn’t shower because we felt it was rather stupid to shower to work in the yard. We hopped into the car to get pancakes and then planned on coming right back home to get started. Over the course of breakfast, Esteban determined that his allergies were causing him to feel like horse dung. What is more, he had a bunch of actual job-related work to do that he really should get done. And he wanted to buy a new computer game. Thus, we ended up going to the electronics store, where he picked up an intensely expensive computer game and I countered with an American Beauty DVD and a computer game I had played several years ago but then Esteban loaned someone the CD’s and I never got to finish. We then hopped back into the car, fully intending that we would go home, but then we ended up driving my favorite run down by the Bay. It was lovely outside. Not terribly warm, but sunny and bright and full of springy goodness. When we got to the end of the road, about 7 miles out of town, instead of turning back around and heading toward our obligations, Esteban turned the car northward, toward the tip of Wisconsin’s little thumb, Door County.
“Where are we going?”
“I thought we’d get some cheese.”
“Because there’s no good cheese in Green Bay.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
But when you’ve had brush with cooter life-and-death, you tend to think not about the way that your bedroom should be raked to quell the scatterings of used tissue or perhaps a dirty sock wrangler ought to be called in before there is a calamitous dirty sock stampede. No. You tend to live in the moment. Seize the cheese, as it were. Thus we went to Door County and scurried around, to and fro, stinky and unwashed and with bad breath which we made worse by eating a lot of dairy products. And still warm cheese curds. God. You’ve just got to love so-fresh-they’re-warm cheese curds. If you squint, you can taste the cow and they squeak against your teeth as you chew them. The curds, not the cows.
We also got pickles and chopped cherry jam. What is more, we found the British Store, where they had HobNobs and Mind The Gap t-shirts and… and…
Fuse bars!
Oh laws sakes yes. Fuse bars. Mickey Fickey Cadbury’s Fuse bars. A dense conglomeration of fudge and rice krispie stuff and raisins and peanuts. Yes, I know that I don’t like peanuts but that’s just a testament to how damn good a Fuse bar is. Even peanut haters have to love the Fuse.
When I returned to the states after my stint in London, I had given up ever tasting the Fusey yum yums ever again. I tried not to even think of them for a chocolate-free ache would settle in the pit of my stomach. I love the Fuse and I almost peed my pants when I saw them at the Brit store in Egg Harbor. They cost $1.20 a piece, about four times what they cost in England. I bought three. One was gone before we even rolled out of the parking lot. The other two are being hidden away. I’m thinking of putting them into my safe deposit box.
We then stopped at a most excellent country bar for world famous burgers in Duvall. At 3:30 on a lovely Saturday afternoon, the bar was packed and for good reason. We ate a lot of greasy food and then trucked on home, sated and with increased blood pressure as our systems tried to negotiate the cholesterol.
Once home, we both took much-needed showers. We then ensconced ourselves in the computer room until Phil called and invited us to a local pub. We both shrugged, deciding that actual social events were more desirable than sitting in our underwear, maniacally playing computer games. Thus, we went to the pub and had lots of nice conversations and caught a live band who were frighteningly like the Gin Blossoms, if the Gin Blossoms had an epileptic bass player.
Sunday was further slackerdom. I did manage to do some shopping with my little brother. He accompanied me to the mall after I promised him that we would eat dinner at The Machine Shed. He was even patient when I messed around at the Prescriptives counter for a half hour to buy some disco blue eye shadow. No. Really. It looks good.
Not Rose McGowan good or anything. But it proves to the world that I am not, in fact, a 50-year-old housewife with a prize winning tatertot casserole recipe, despite that I have tatertot thighs and an ass molded by hours of watching Must See TV.
The things we do to maintain our denial.
