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Blogs

No one must know my terrible secret...

House of Noh!

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

I’m off the ‘tips. The ‘tips are what got me in this mess in the first place. They SEEM like they’d get the wax out of my ears, being all absorbent and cottony and all. But really, whenever I slide a ‘tip deep, deep into my ear canal, I think it just pushes the wax in there further, all hard and compacted, like a waxy little ear-clogging stink-nugget. I’ve got two wax-nuggets, one for each ear. But the one in the left ear is the worst. It’s not so dense, but (counter-intuitively) that’s bad. The left ear nugget is big and soft and wet and diffuse, and it’s clogged the whole of my left ear canal.

So now it sounds to me like I’m underwater all the time, except for just a second after I press that little flap of cartilage down over my ear hole and let it up, and it seals for a second and then releases, and the pressure differential opens up my ear canal and lets me hear for just a second. Sometimes when I press it, my ear stays open, but ninety-nine percent of the time it goes back to clogged in a microsecond. I call that little flap of cartilage my “reset button.” At best, pressing it is a temporary fix. I’m in a deplorable state. I can’t hear on the way to work and assholes are sneaking up behind me on the el platforms and startling me with their presence. And I’ve had to turn my T.V. up way loud, like a senior citizen, and now I am shamed because everybody in my apartment building knows I am a huge fan of Elimidate. Worst of all, when my boss comes into my office yelling and pointing at me and gesticulating, I have no idea what he’s yelling at me about and I have to further complicate the situation by furiously pressing my reset button while asking, “what?” “what?” “what?” “I can’t hear you, my reset button’s not working,” “what?”

Whenever I tell somebody my ear is clogged up, they’re always like, “that’s what Q-tips are for!” That’s what Sharon P. said. But I told her the ‘tips were what got me into this mess in the first place. I told her that I was off the ‘tips for good, choosing rather to swab my ears with hand-twisted sticks of toilet-paper. So I guess that’s why she made such a big deal when she caught me in the bathroom of her apartment, me with a ‘tip from the jar by her mirror in each of my ears. I knew I was spending too much time quietly in the bathroom to not arouse suspicion, not having established a diarrhea cover story or anything.

“Aha! I knew it!” she shouted and laughed. “You’re back on the ‘tips!”

So I was.

I was back on the ‘tips. But it was worth it because I was hitting pay-dirt. Sharon P. agreed to look at the first few ‘tips I pulled out, so she saw the one that was all waxy brown, all the way to the stick, and the one that had a dollop of stinky ear wax on it. She said that she was impressed. But after that she refused to look at the ‘tips anymore, and she missed the one with the fibrous waxy bundle on it, and the one oozing black ear tar, and the ‘tip that came out with a little piece of the nugget intact, like a little moon rock or something. That one was the best one of all and she missed it. I was getting a shitload of wax out of my ears. Why couldn’t she just be happy for me?