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Sep. 5th, 2009 09:53 pmI hate getting hiccups so, so much, mostly because I hiccup really loud and in this gaspy way. I am doing it right now and not even drinking anything seems to help.
You know how you have those little moments when you remember something that happened to you, and then you go, "Oh my GOD, that was eons ago!" I had a moment like that, staring at my hands at the dentist's the other day. When I was in fourth grade, one day on the playground I got cornered by a swarm of boys who were taunting me about something and threatening to beat me up (like they could've done anything, hello). One of them, Matt, was carrying a pencil with him because he'd been drawing something since he was on the quiet side, but he'd somehow joined the mob of shouty nine year old boys and he wound up next to me.
Since I was crowded around by all these kids and my best friends had somehow wound up stuck behind the crowd, I threw my arms up in the air trying to wiggle free. And somehow, in the midst of this, my left hand (and, more specifically, my left middle finger) connected with the tip of Matt's finger.
Nothing makes little boys scatter quicker than when a girl starts screaming and/or crying. And since I had a pencil point lodged into my finger, that's what I did. A good number of the boys ran the other way, one of them (Stefan, who I mentioned a long, long time ago) ran to get one of the teachers, and poor Matt just kind of stood there looking dazed. Whichever teacher on duty rushed me over to the nurse's office, where they looked at my finger and tried to get me to stop crying. I remember asking if we could use an ice pack to pull the pencil point out, in the same way you use an ice pack to remove a bee stinger (something that I'd done a year before at camp), and the nurse (I... think she was actually a parent volunteer, not a real legit school nurse) said that no, it wouldn't work like that. I think they made some phone calls to my parents, and I overheard one of the teachers say something about it being lucky that the pencil I'd been accidentally stabbed with was graphite and not real lead, because then I'd probably end up with an infection or something.
And that wasn't the smartest thing to say around an impressionable nine year old, because then I became convinced that I was going to die. I remember going home and having my mom look at my finger and having that question in the back of my mind the whole time, but not asking. And then crawling into bed that night scared that the sliver of lead would somehow kill me while I was sleeping.
I have had that piece of pencil stuck in my left middle finger for almost fifteen years now. Yeah.
Neat link: What Book Got You Hooked? I think mine was Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume. I still have my water-logged copy with my books in a box. I read and reread that book so many times when I was a kid that I used to leave it in our bathroom, and somehow it got under our sink. One day, one of the pipes under the sink started leaking, and my book got soaked.
You know how you have those little moments when you remember something that happened to you, and then you go, "Oh my GOD, that was eons ago!" I had a moment like that, staring at my hands at the dentist's the other day. When I was in fourth grade, one day on the playground I got cornered by a swarm of boys who were taunting me about something and threatening to beat me up (like they could've done anything, hello). One of them, Matt, was carrying a pencil with him because he'd been drawing something since he was on the quiet side, but he'd somehow joined the mob of shouty nine year old boys and he wound up next to me.
Since I was crowded around by all these kids and my best friends had somehow wound up stuck behind the crowd, I threw my arms up in the air trying to wiggle free. And somehow, in the midst of this, my left hand (and, more specifically, my left middle finger) connected with the tip of Matt's finger.
Nothing makes little boys scatter quicker than when a girl starts screaming and/or crying. And since I had a pencil point lodged into my finger, that's what I did. A good number of the boys ran the other way, one of them (Stefan, who I mentioned a long, long time ago) ran to get one of the teachers, and poor Matt just kind of stood there looking dazed. Whichever teacher on duty rushed me over to the nurse's office, where they looked at my finger and tried to get me to stop crying. I remember asking if we could use an ice pack to pull the pencil point out, in the same way you use an ice pack to remove a bee stinger (something that I'd done a year before at camp), and the nurse (I... think she was actually a parent volunteer, not a real legit school nurse) said that no, it wouldn't work like that. I think they made some phone calls to my parents, and I overheard one of the teachers say something about it being lucky that the pencil I'd been accidentally stabbed with was graphite and not real lead, because then I'd probably end up with an infection or something.
And that wasn't the smartest thing to say around an impressionable nine year old, because then I became convinced that I was going to die. I remember going home and having my mom look at my finger and having that question in the back of my mind the whole time, but not asking. And then crawling into bed that night scared that the sliver of lead would somehow kill me while I was sleeping.
I have had that piece of pencil stuck in my left middle finger for almost fifteen years now. Yeah.
Neat link: What Book Got You Hooked? I think mine was Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume. I still have my water-logged copy with my books in a box. I read and reread that book so many times when I was a kid that I used to leave it in our bathroom, and somehow it got under our sink. One day, one of the pipes under the sink started leaking, and my book got soaked.
