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Whenever a stranger on the street asks me for directions, I always, always stop and try to help.

Because I am a helpful person.

So yesterday morning, after semi-successfully vanquishing my lousy mood at the gym, I’m heading to work. And up ahead of me on the sidewalk I see this guy talking on his cellphone. And I’m thinking, this poor guy. He has all these freckles, and red hair, and poor eyesight, and obvious problems with his adenoids, and no grasp of flattering fashion. And also, he’s wearing a Yankees cap and jersey, which leads me to suspect that he might be retarded. (I know it’s not very zen of me to keep this running inner monologue that consists mostly of stranger-judging and Death Wish-style fantasies. If I could learn meditation I’m sure the voices would quiet a bit. I have a number of meditation albums on my iPod. I only listen to them on the subways to drown out everyone around me. But I’ve learned that it’s important to remember how strangers are dressed and what they look like because as a Hysterical Feminist^®, I believe that all men are potential rapists. As an added bonus, this enables me to follow men’s fashion trends pretty closely.)

But I’m saying this because this guy is standing right in my way on the sidewalk, talking on his cellphone. And me, I’m listening to my Getting Psyched for Quietly Resigned to Work mix, which begins with “Can I Say.” And I’m looking at him because now I’m right in front of him. He’s pretty tall. And he takes his phone from his ear and starts saying something to me and because I AM A HELPFUL PERSON I pull my headphones out of my ears and I’m expecting him to ask for directions to one of the myriad neighborhood methadone clinics (because maybe he’s not retarded, just addled) and I say, “Pardon me?”

And he says, “I said how you doin’ this morning, mama?”

In terms of threat level, dickhead was more along the lines of Annoying Pinstripe Fedora Dude than Schrodinger’s Rapist. But you know what? Fuck that guy. I generally just shake my head and keep walking in situations such as these*, but yesterday? I was irritated. So I say to him, “Is this your strategy? Do you just interrupt women you don’t even know on the street to harass them?”

And he gets all exercised and hoots and says “YEAH!”

And over my shoulder I shout, “GOOD LUCK WITH THAT, DICKHEAD!” What can I say, why should I try, indeed.

But seriously: Fuck that guy, and fuck YOU if you’ve ever been that guy.

*And of course the one time I actually engaged in conversation in one of these situations it turned into some Herzog short. I was in Prospect Heights, running an errand, and this guy driving an ambulette van slowed down to talk to me. (It should be noted that the sole requirements to become an ambulette driver in NYC are that you be a) insane and b) completely unaware of driving rules and regulations.)

Him: “Hello there.”

Me, walking, pulling headphones off: “Hi.”

Him: “Did you know that you’re beautiful?”

Me: “Yes.”

Him: “Can I give you my number?”

Me: “I’m married.”

Him, cars honking behind him: “Does your husband tell you every day that you’re beautiful?”

Me, trying to get him off my case, though clearly the honking isn’t deterring his mission: “Yes.”

Him: “Because I think it’s real important that a woman gets told that she’s beautiful. Every day.”

Me, hitting the street corner and turning left: “That’s nice.”

Him: “Especially when they’re on their period.”

Me: [???]

Him, driving off: “You have a nice day, beautiful.”

Epilogue: I still can’t tell if that was serious street harassment or performance art. Naturally as soon as he was out of sight, I spun my skirt in a 360 in the middle of the sidewalk, just to check…well, you know.

For dinner tonight I ate like three fantastic sandwiches prepared by a male model and a giant delicious piece of cake made by a fairy princess in celebration of our friend K’s birthday. We were talking about BP (because that is more or less the ONLY THING I can talk about aside from Top Chef and that’s only when I’m sedated) and I said something along the lines of “I’m not an advocate of violent retribution, but I’d like to see the VP EVERY MEMBER of BP’s leadership strung up by his nuts in a public square”* and K interrupted me and said, “What do you mean you don’t believe in violence? Last time I saw you, you had just discovered that you’d spent your evening talking to [the dipshit daughter of a famous Republican] and you fell down on the floor in lamentation and said you felt like a time-traveler who missed the opportunity to kill Hitler by 15 minutes. Remember?”

I guess I remember that. And I guess he’s right.

Because later on when this dorky, middle aged couple came in I was reminded of that scene in Trainspotting where Renton, Begbie, Tommy et al mug a rich American tourist into the pub bathroom and I said as much to K and he said “See, I TOLD you you were a proponent of violence. And that’s why I like you.”

Oh, and speaking of violence (that I’m *not* an advocate of) as well as another bullshit medical condition, the Miami New Times has a very interesting story about “excited delirium,” aka “when the cops kill you in custody.”

*When I say shit like this, it makes me feel like my dad.

I had every intention of canceling my membership at my gym, which is located above a hellmouth of bedbug and cologne contamination, but when I went in there I was talked out of it by a sympathetic lady with a house in LI and a 4-year-old-son — so she understood, really, but why don’t I just go to the other gym locations if that’s the issue — and arms like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 [warning: sound]. How will I ever get those arms if I don’t stay at 24 Hour Infestation & Racquet Club?*

So instead of leaving, and because I’m too lazy to go to one of the other locations, I followed the advice of a friend who’s dealt with Biblical-proportion bedbugs and when I get to the gym I put all my clothes and my entire gym bag inside of a giant Ziploc bag. I really like these bags. They speak to me as only a high-quality plastic bag can. I can see myself a few months down the line ditching my gym bag and using just the Ziploc to transport all my stuff. That will also be the day on which I have Entirely Given Up.

As you know already, I am interested in Internet phenomena and memes [warning: lazy Wikipedia links], particularly when they involve bullshit medical conditions** such as Morgellons Disease. How has a condition that pretty much no one in meatspace believes exists (except biased researchers) gotten so much traction online? Precisely because IT’S A DISEASE NO ONE IN MEATSPACE BELIEVES EXISTS!*** Surely there is some sort of Internet Law that explains this principle: The more improbable your illness is in the real world, the more credulously received it will be online.

I went to the dermatologist a few weeks ago for my annual Maybe THIS Year It’s Cancerous consult. I like him even though his paper gowns are the flimsiest I’ve ever seen. Halfway through my full-body exam I’ve already ripped the gown in half as though I’ve mistaken it for a tearaway track suit. Anyhow, after we were done he asked me if I had any questions.

Me: Yeah, do you know what Morgellons is?

Him: No.

Me: It’s a medical condition that most doctors think is a form of delusional parasitosis and it’s characterized by colorful threads growing out of people’s skin.

Him: And why do you care about this?

I guess we don’t get fake diseases in NYC all that much because we already have real things to contend with….like BEDBUGS.

Anyhow, I have kinda weird feet that are always, always calloused and virtually impervious to things like sharp rocks and glass shards and hypodermic needles. Shortly after my trip to el dermo, I noticed the pad of my left foot was hurting when I put pressure on it. I sat down and looked at it really closely and saw that something dark appeared to be embedded a few layers of skin down. I love doing home surgery, so I started poking at it with a pair of tweezers, hoping it wasn’t a plantar’s wart.

After considerable digging, I extracted a half-inch-long black, wiry hair. Seriously. I weighed two possibilities: that God was punishing me for making fun of people with bullshit maladies all these years, and that a hair of foreign origin had somehow wormed its way into my foot. Both seemed equally implausible, but I settled for the second one.

And then, last week, I noticed the same pain, in the same part of my foot. And using the tweezers and a safety pin I pulled YET ANOTHER black, wiry hair, this one the length of an eyelash. And N witnessed it this time!

So great. I have contracted Internet Crazy Disease. I am building a website to support my cause as soon as I can find the right Celine Dion midis to embed.

*I see there was a bedbug scare at Kings County Hospital. I have been to KCH and I can assure you that a single bedbug is the least of its hygiene problems. By the way, the Linda Hamilton arms thing is a joke. I will never have those. Even at 115 lbs in high school I had Ethel Merman arms. It’s my genetic lot in life. I blame the Newfies.

**Many years back I got sick — really sick, like 100-blood-tests-and-still-no-diagnosis sick — and I had a passionate and vaguely creepy infectious diseases specialist who assured me that he believed I really was sick and he was determined to figure it out. I remember saying to him, “Please don’t tell me it’s Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, because I don’t believe that exists, OK?” Never did figure out what it was. It just went away on its own after two years.

***And that, my friends, actually is what is referred to as begging the question.

It’s been fun watching the jerkwad morning news people on Fox pretend to care about the World Cup. One of them finally broke down this morning and said, “I don’t know about you but I can’t wait for the real football season to start.” I watch this sort of TV at the gym, particularly when MTV is replaying some show about Queen Latifah for the umpteenth time. (Does anyone in the MTV demographic care about her? I would think they know her only as a smart-talking, sexless sidekick in shitty summer movies.) Good for you, Fox dude. Be honest. I won’t think any less of you.

So, my gym has decided to switch from a scan-card system to — get this — fingerprint recognition. There’s not even conditioner in the showers and yet we have to pretend we’re at the NSA? (I don’t even have that technology at work. I have a card-entry door that’s been propped open since before I got here.) I balked initially until they said my other option was to show a picture ID every time I came in, which seemed somehow…inconvenient…in comparison to the theoretical intrusiveness of a fingerprint scan. Well, I figured, my fingerprints are already on file somewhere (vestige of the post-Adam-Walsh-scary-man-gonna-come-get-ALL-the-kids era) and 23andMe has my entire genetic sequence, so…two tears in a bucket, etc.

Speaking of genetics, I have been slowly tracing a very tiny branch of my family tree back 200 years. Until last week, I honestly thought that my people didn’t even come down from the trees until the 1939 World’s Fair. It turns out that no, we go back quite a ways…to Newfoundland. Newfies! It’s a wonder I can even read. Something else I’ve discovered about my family, though I can only conjecture based on the tidbits of data I’ve dug up: They were fucking miserable. (See! I was BRED to be this way!) They wended their way through the provinces, stopping for awhile in Ontario to be, from what I can tell, subsistence farmers. Look at this map. That’s Marlborough Township. See that little red rectangle? That’s the property owned by my great-great-great-grandfather and one of his sons. That’s it. At the turn of the 20th century, they got to NY, where the men worked as boilermakers and shipbuilders at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and eventually they all died of the various diseases one gets from working in the Navy Yard. This would probably explain why my great-great-grandmother was working as a laundress at a private school in Long Island in her late 60s, according to the 1930 Census. And oh, to sing of the misery on my grandmother’s mother’s side of the family. Her great-grandfather became a widower with seven kids in the early 1900s. He, too, worked at the Navy Yard. I don’t quite know what he eventually died of, but as of 1930, he was still alive…and committed in a mental hospital upstate. Meanwhile, my great-grandmother went on to get married three times and, at some point in the 60s, destroy all our family documents so that none of us will ever know anything about our ancestry beyond where they lived when their families finally abandoned them. Whee! I knew that this might be a depressing exercise, but I had no idea it would be this sad.

Now I’ve depressed myself. More. Anyhow, back to happier stuff…

Actually, this is a bit sad (but a good interview): Dr. Demento: Off The Air, But Still Happily Deranged. I loooooved listening to Dr. Demento when I was an awkward, Monty-Python-quoting adolescent.* Every Sunday night, 11 pm, on PIX 106, the Capital District’s Home of Classic Rock, with headphones plugged into my clock radio. So, to end on a happy note, here is the great Bonzo Dog Band, Tubas In the Moonlight.

*I have also seen Weird Al in concert.