And Laying A Finger Aside Of His Nose

We just returned from the Christmas choir concert at Newmentia. Not that we went for pleasure. The #1 son is in choir.

Spectator H and I pulled cafeteria chairs into the gym to sit on the mezzanine behind the last row of bleachers. Unfortunately, some other family attendees hijacked our most scathingly brilliant idea, and plopped FOUR chairs down right next to me. And I mean rightnexttome! It was an invasion of my personal space.

To make matters worse, the woman was wearing a funky kind of lotion or perfume, which makes Mrs. Hillbilly Mom splutter due to secretions running down the back of her throat in some kind of allergic reaction to fragrances.

To make matters worser, their spawn was up and down and trotting around in some weird Hillbilly Mom ear drum torture device tap shoes for toddlers, even standing in front of me and blocking my view. Though thankfully not tapping.

To make matters worsest, Typhoid H has contracted an exotic form of snot-spraying, phlegm-hawking, nasal-snorkeling illness that would make Stephen King's superflu in The Stand look like a latter-day eradicated polio virus. He leaned over every 27.5 seconds to whisper something out loud into my mouth. Just like a kid, not understanding that people hear with their ears, not their oral cavities.

I kept inching my chair backwards about six inches at a time, hoping to put myself behind his emissions. But Typhoid H would not be outbacked. He kept moving his chair back at a rate of nine inches at a time, so he was perpetually behind me, launching his juicy flotsam and jetsam forward to be sucked in by my unwitting respiratory system. I put up the program as a barrier, I lifted my shirt collar to strain out some slobbers, and finally told Typhoid H to move his chair farther away from me. Like Kate telling her camping-yearning urchin that he was now a Palin, no longer a Gosselin, I ceased being a Hillbilly, and became one of the annoying Tap Shoe family. In appearances, anyway, because I was so close to their chairs, on the other side of a woman-made chasm from Typhoid H.

Who knew that listening to Christmas music could be so exhausting?