I never thought it would end like this...

Yesterday, horrified by the experience I suffered at the Huntington 7--

What were they, you ask?

Oh, only me wanting to turn around, vault my movie chair, and strangle a group of teenage wads of inhuman filth, composed of sweat, oil, hair products, backward baseball caps (right Dad?), oversized clothing, androgen, and pure unadultrated Evil.

Because treating women like objects in the presence of women is so cool, and a great way to get the girls.

I told Mom what they had been saying and she was horrified to the point of sheer rage. I love my mom. She was also very disturbed by it. Seriously offended. To the point that she tried to stop me talking about it later. But it didn't work, because I told my brother, Paul, about it the second we were out of earshot.

I wanted a male reaction. Shut up, Jennifer. And I knew Paul, having lived in the all-guy dorm at MC, would have heard all this before and probably worse.

"Actually, no," Paul replied after voicing rage at the horrible perverted writhing chunks of crap I had to sit in front of. Flippin' idiot Seat-Kickers from Hell.

"If someone tried saying something like that on my floor, my neighbor, Matt, would tell them to shut up."

"And it worked?" I asked, skeptically.

"Sure," Paul replied. "Because if someone asked "Why?" Matt would just take off his shirt, point at his eight-pack, and scream at the top of his lungs "This is why!" And if Shawn saw him with his shirt off screaming that, he would take off his shirt too and scream the same thing, just because he liked taking off his shirt and threatening people."

Now, Matt isn't your most savory individual. But the fact that he would do something like that to defend women not present--in fact, probably imagined, made me happy. And it made me love MC more, because at MC, intolerance is the only reason why anyone I knew of was ever treated like crap. If you were a jerk, people treated you like one. They didn't bow down and worship you because they were afraid to contradict you.

--And still nauseated by my lunchtime witnessing of what might be the grossest thing ever--

What?

Oh, just an old, shriveled man walking past me and my mom and our yummy food over to the trash cans several feet away, snorting and shooting out a wad of nasal discharge and spit out onto the ground in front of him, and did I mention it was feet away from where we sat?

Then he walked back to work. Where was he working? At the church booth we were eating at. He wasn't touching the food, but still...

Somehow, the Best Tenderloin Ever didn't taste quite so nice anymore.

--Jen and I went off to Fort Wayne. We always have fun at Biaggi's, and this time we had arrived early enough to actually go shopping a little at the mall, where an outdoor concert was taking place.

As we exited Barnes and Nobles, something funny started to happen with my hand.

At first, it was just this weird feeling. Somewhere in my middle finger. The middle finger of my left hand.

Understand that this finger, let's call it Finger Eight, gets little to no independant use in my day to day life. Sometimes, I'll have too many shopping bags and will hook one of them with that digit, but that's it. I'm not one of those people that uses it as a Primary Driving Finger, used to impart my wisdom on other drivers.

No.

It also gets use in tangent with my left hand. Such as, say, in knitting. Or in twisting caps of things, or in opening doors.

But that's not a whole lot.

No, Fingers One through Five get most of the work in my life.

So the weird feeling was unusual. Then it evolved into a Weird Feeling. Then a Weirder Feeling. Then it became a freaky Finger Cramp, similar to a charley horse thing you get in your foot. The Finger Cramp was confined to the lowest portion of my finger, the first joint. The one closest to the palm. Look at your hand. See that little muscle there (under the skin, obviously, but you can make out the shape of it)? That's the one.

But it didn't stop there. No, it became the Super Freaky Finger Cramp when the vein in my finger became very clear. At that time, it evolved from simple pain into Real Pain. That was when it became the Super Freaky Finger Cramp of Supreme Pain.

That vein, though, looked like a bad thing. I was, at this point, flexing my finger and shaking my hand about, and since my brain just works that way, it meant that I was doing a jazz hands move, all while walking past dozens of concert goers.

The pain just seemed to get worse, though. Much worse. And because of the vein involvement, this is what was happening in my brain.

You have a blood clot. Your years of bad eating and no physical activity have come back to bite you in the hand, Laura. Your Super Freaky Finger Cramp of Supreme Pain is actually symptom one of oncoming death. Yes, you have the Hand Cramp of Death, and it has started the countdown. You'll be dropping any minute, right after your vein pops like a champange cork and you get to watch!

The Hand Cramp of Death is here, Laura. It has come for you, and--oh! Just look at all the people you get to die in front of. Here's Jen, who will undoubtedly be emotionally scarred by the horror she is about to witness. Too bad, you get to add to whatever emotional baggage your friend already has in her life with your freakish death, the perfect capstone to a freakish life, only grosser.

Oh, and look! All of these people came to watch a concert, but what they didn't know was that they really came to watch your gruesome death. Lucky the local news is here to catch it all on film!

I showed the freakish problem to Jennifer, still shaking my hand like I was having a nervous tic, and scanned the crowd for a first aid kit. What would they do? Poke it with something? Something sharp?

Meanwhile, because there was so much going on with my finger, the digit had swollen greatly, and there was an undue amount of nerve pain caused by added pressure. But the fingertip wasn't numb, which I took as a good sign.

"It's probably just a blood vessel," Jen said. "You burst it. It won't kill you."

But the thought of my blood vessel bursting like a piece of ripe fruit hurled from a high-rise window (like on Letterman) might indeed have killed me.

See, it's all about how neurotic I am. Not enough to get committed, but just enough to make me overreact about certain social or physical things. Like something I may or may not have stood in causing me to wash the sole of my shoe with bleach for 15 minutes straight, just in case. Or my never wearing a certain pair of shoes because they had walked through God Knows What in the Canterbury West Station. Or my staring at the back of an acquaintance's head all through dinner while I tried to talk myself both out and into saying hello to them.

Neurotic.

Then, just as we reached The Loft, the pain began to fade and life started to improve for me.

But this morning, that whole finger is still swollen, and now it is bruised all to heck. So all in all, this weekend has kind of sucked.