Photo from:   acme of Flickr

Still, there’s something about the microscopic world, something about something so powerful being intangible and difficult to control, that I get the antsies whenever I think about disease or infection or other things of that nature.

Which leads me to being out with my wife over the weekend.

It was a fine weekend. My wife insisted that we go to JC Penny’s–partially because her wallet had decided to play this fun little game called “stab the owner, and partially because they just ran a new ad supporting gay marriage and my wife wanted to support their support…this parenthetical statement is incredibly long now, isn’t it?–and after we finished with that, we decided to walk to the fro-yo place down the road and get dessert. However, a group of rowdy teenagers showed up, and we decided to walk to the food court to eat our fro-yo in peace.

The moment we entered the food court, my nose began to play a lovely waltz with the local Chinese restaurant. It’s not good Chinese food, but sometimes, you just want cheap, shitty Chinese food, y’know? So, after I convinced my wife that this was something that I had to have, we wandered over where I piled my plate high with blood-red sweet-and-sour chicken.

Something like 10 minutes later, I was full and kinda sick, but not sorry.

It turned cold on the way back to the car, we we made the last leg of our journey in a rush. We jumped into the car and cranked the heater all the way. It was then that I noticed a little smudge on my hand, a little red smear. Without thinking I stuck out my tongue and took a big solid lick.

Instead of the tangy, sweet flavor of sweet and sour sauce, my mouth was assaulted with a metallic, irony taste, and my brain immediately began screaming, BLOODBLOODOHMYGODIJUSTLICKEDBLOODSWEETBABYCHRIST!!!!

I tried to play it cool, but my wife could tell something was wrong. I was really tense and not talkative. All I could imagine was some AIDS ridden hobo had smeared his blood on a public surface and now I was infected–all because I thought I was licking some dried sweet and sour sauce.

Eventually, my wife pulled the confession out of me:

“What’s wrong with you? You’re acting weird, even for you.”

“I think I have AIDS.”

“What?”

“I just licked what I thought was sweet and sour sauce off my hand, but it didn’t taste like sweet and sour sauce and I think it was blood, and now I may have AIDS.”

“You know that you’re ridiculous, right?”

“I’m just saying, what if it was hobo blood or something? I should go get my blood tested right now!”

“Well, if you did have AIDS, that’s something I would definitely want to know. Being your wife and all.”

“Ooooohhhhhh, GOD!”

“Oh, shut up. You’re fine. You don’t have AIDS. Or sweet and sour AIDS, you weirdo.”

I want to stress that I’m not mocking people with AIDS. I’m mocking my ridiculous reaction to the most mundane of situations when illness is involved. The other day I scratched one of my fingers on the bathtub faucet washing my hair (like a boss) and spent the entire day thinking I had tetanus.

I hear they just cured a baby that had AIDS. This is fantastic, especially for people like me who live in fear of accidentally getting an incurable disease from our sweet-and-sour Chinese chicken.