1987. I’m wearing black with glitter on my eyes, holding a shampoo bottle filled with glitter shampoo.
Finally we know who caused the bite of ‘87
I’m pretty sure the shampoo was not involved in this particular incident. It is possible that a small, exquisitely sensitive tapeworm parasite may have been somehow affected by my glitter-filled hair and chosen to bite me as an act of protest. But I think it much more likely that the cause lay elsewhere entirely. Like many people with chronic illnesses I suffer from what might be called emotional flatulence, or “farts,” for short. (Although technically speaking you can get farted on without experiencing any physical symptoms; emotions are tricky things.)
Emotional farts often occur during certain kinds of conversation – namely those where someone tells you about their life experiences, usually because they want advice or sympathy. The process goes something like this: You listen sympathetically while your friend tells you how difficult her day has been. Then she finishes up by saying, smiling sadly, “But don’t worry! Everything will turn out all right!” And there’s a brief pause before a wave of emotion rises within you. This feeling turns into words (“Yeah … whatever”) which rise onto your lips like helium balloons inflating. Sometimes these words come out sounding sarcastic even though nothing but positivity lies behind them. At other times, if you fail to control yourself, they sound downright hostile. In either case, your friend feels hurt and becomes upset. They wonder why you aren’t grateful enough for their kind words, so they say something back that hurts your feelings. Repeat several hundred million times per year.
In fact, although you wanted to express genuine gratitude, you had no intention of being disrespectful. Your brain just went ahead and did its own thing anyway. So now everyone is angry at each other, including you, who didn’t do anything wrong except exist. When I was younger I thought this sort of situation could only happen when somebody else’s brain worked weirdly, since my brain seems perfectly normal. Nowadays I know better. My friends tell me all the time that it happens to them too. These days most people would probably call such situations “miscommunication” rather than blame one person specifically for having done something wrong. That’s good. Unfortunately, however, our brains still don’t seem very interested in learning from miscommunications. There appears to be some basic design defect that makes us keep making exactly the same mistakes over and over again.
So the next time your friend says, “Don’t worry, everything will work out fine!” try giving him/her a hug instead. Or, failing that, buy them a cake. Either way, nobody gets bitten.











