That should explain a lot.

We took niceties over to my dorm room yesterday. I didn’t do it at the beginning of the year because I am unsure of my car, and I thought I was being silly, and that a few curtains were good enough. Now I have an oriental rug (from the alley) and a rocker (from a yard sale – $5 – I felt like a thief) and a coffee table (from my parents’ house). It’s all warm and cozy now.

I took my traveling stand-up comic show to the walk-in clinic on Tuesday for a probable sinus infection. The nurse was asking me silly questions, like “Shortness of breath?” Hello, COPD. “Nasal Discharge?” Hello, Chronic rhinitis. But that’s where it started. She was complaining about the computer not letting her spell rhinitis with two “n’s.” I of course said, “Damn you, Spell Checker!” followed by, “It won’t let me use “dickhead” either.”*

Then, I saw the nurse practitioner, or whatever he was. The nurse told me he talks a lot. She didn’t mention that he talks a lot, and in circles, and then expects you to have followed what he was saying and give him some kind of conclusion. This was complicated by the fact that I’d gotten up feeling incoherent and dizzy, which is why I decided I probably had a sinus infection.

So, he looks in my right ear and says something like, “You must be really sturdy to have an ear like that.” I think he used the word sturdy. It might have been tough. But my head remembered grumpy, or maybe curmudgeonly, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t say that. I’m not really sure why my ear made him think I was “sturdy.” And then he goes off on how everything is puffy (he might have used the word “turgid.” I think I have just inserted words that had “U” in them. Maybe that’s what he saw in my ear – the letter “U”). Anyway. Gave me antibiotics and a prescription for Claritin (for two months, or the rest of my life, depending). Yesterday on the way up the hill to the Mall in Duluth, my ear popped, and I can now hear words that don’t have “U in them.

So I’m happy. I didn’t have to file assault charges, and I got what I needed. (Let’s hope this is a trend that continues.) School starts on Monday. I have money on my ID so I can get breakfast. I’m working on organizing my daily life. I can do this, and do it well.

* (I shouldn’t be like that to strangers. They probably expect me to remember their faces and talk to them the next time I see them. I can’t recognize faces well or much. Changed your hair? Don’t know you. Not in the doctor’s office in a uniform? Never saw you before. But the Perkins hostess who wore a nice sweater two years ago that one time we went to Perkins in Superior? Recognized her on sight – in Perkins. Maybe you have to wear a nice sweater.)

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