All right. Sure. Plus: Ear wax!

A conversation from this morning:

I'm in the living room, putting my coat on. John is sitting on the couch, drinking milk, eating Cheerios and watching Blue's Clues.

"Where going?" he asked me.

"I'm going to work."

"John with you?"

"No, you can't go with me. You've got to go to school."

"All right," John said, "sure."

["Sure" is the hot new word lately, and John says it in a bored, patronizing voice. As in, "sure, we'll do what you said, you moron. Like I care." He's basically a teenager. I imagine "whatever" will be the next popular word.]

"I love you. Have a good day."

"Love you." And he went back to his breakfast.

* * *

Readers who are easily squicked by the human body and its various by-products can stop reading here. Fair warning.

* * *

So I'm getting out of the shower this morning and I'm using a little toilet paper to get some water out of my ears. I don't use cotton swabs, as a rule. They scare me. Sticking things inside my head always scares me.

I push a little toilet paper into my ear and I feel something thunk solidly into my eardrum. I pull the toilet paper out, but too late; everything is muffled on my right side. Blocked!

This happened to me once in college, too. I had to go to the doctor and he used this thing (that looked like the bottle my grandfather used to attach to the garden hose to fertilize the lawn) to spray water in my ear and eventually chase out a lump of wax the size of a Miata.

"It happens to almost everybody," the doctor said that time, "the wax gets pushed back and pushed back until there's no more room."

At lunch I went to Walgreens' and got an ear-cleaning kit. Contents: fizzy ear medicine and a syringe. Then I picked up some lunch and took it to Sonya's office to have A Romantic Lunch With The Wife.

I get there and I walk into the little kitchen in Sonya's office to get some salt. For a split-second the whole world tilted just a teeny bit, then I felt something fall inside my ear. I could hear again! I reached in my ear and retrieved a distressingly large ball of wax. No wonder I couldn't hear!

I'm still going to use the ear-cleaning kit tonight. Apparently I need it.