people say she’s crazy…

I come from ear cleaning people.

About 20 years ago, my dad had an ear infection, and his doctor laid him down on his side and flushed out the offending orifice with some good old hydrogen peroxide. The nurse told him he should do so with some regularity, so he brought the habit home and subjected me and MZ to it with some regularity until we went to college.

On a related note, my mom was always fond of Q-Tipping our ears (which yes, I know, you are not supposed to do). She’d get a firm grip on the flappy ear parts with her left hand, insert the Q-Tip with her right, and turn, clockwise on the right ear, counterclockwise on the left ear (toward the face, if you will). About 2/3 of the way through, the Q-Tip would reach some delightful point of impact, and it would poke a little and hurt a little as it moved past some ridge or crevasse or something and, in short, be more satisfying than words.

When you lay on your side and pour a capful of hydrogen peroxide into your ear, a number of things start to happen. First of all, you can’t really hear all that well and your shoulder eventually starts to itch a little from the diamond-patterned bathroom carpet that was installed in 1986. And your ear gets all fizzy, and you really feel like those bubbles are detaching things unthinkable from the inner caverns of your ear. When you’re little, it’s hard not to twitch and giggle for those 2 minutes you lie there. When you’re big, it’s hard not to twitch and giggle for those 2 minutes you lie there. After those 2 minutes, you put a bunched up Kleenex over your ear and sit up, tipping your head to the other side and feeling the gush of coldish, warmish peroxide out of your head and into the tissue.

When you are a regular Q-Tipper (as all four members of my immediate family are), hydrogen peroxide flushing does not produce any… tangible results. Q-Tips take care of the buildup that a flushing would wash out in clumps. It still feels good, though. I recommend both methods be implemented in some moderation, particularly for those iPod owners who do a lot of wearing of in-ear buds.

But why Q-tip or HP oneself to achieve aural cleanliness? Why go through the trouble of using a sterile, soft-tipped implement or carefully, hygienically rinsing ones ears out when one can do an excellent scrape-and-swirl job WITH A BALLPOINT PEN. A CLIC STICK. LIKE THESE BABIES:

This evening, after a hearty workout wherein I enjoyed Katie Couric’s opening night of the CBS Evening News while listening to my iPod (through the magic of closed-captioning) and, when Katie had signed off, an enlightening article in The New Yorker about the Duke Lacrosse team scandal, I grabbed me some Jamba and had the seemingly good fortune of catching a 36 bus north on Broadway. Normally I walk home from the gym, but Access Hollywood kept me on the elliptical machine a little longer than I’d expected to be there, and I was lugging work clothes, etc. So I jumped on and took a big, wide-open double seat to myself. I had bags, people, lots of bags. And a big pink smoothie.

As is customary on Chicago public transportation, I proceeded to examine those around me without looking them in the eye: girl with bull-ring nose piercing, crazy-eyed man talking to himself (par for the course on the 36), a handful of double-widers negotiating 2 seats together between poles and unsuspecting single-seaters. The girl in the seat right in front of me had a cute haircut. The woman in the seat in front of me on the aisle was holding a pretty handkerchief in which she seemed to be… cleaning something, making a pencil-sharpening motion into her left hand with something in her right hand. Nice hanky.

And oh, yeah, it was a ballpoint pen, nib retracted, thank you very much. And when she was done cleaning it in her poor, poor hanky, where did she put it? Oh right, directly into her right ear. I gasped audibly. The gay couple behind me laughed out loud. She wiggled, she scraped, she dug. She brought it out. I looked away until whatever gold she done dug was safely buried in that poor, poor hanky. She repeated, and she repeated. She a gold digger; she got needs. I got off the bus a stop early.

As you may have noticed, I do not get queasy easily, particularly when it comes to the delightful relief of a clean ear and the ways of achieving such cleanliness. But a pen? On a BUS? Could she not have waited until she was home? Or in a bathroom stall? Or had something other than a CLIC STICK to work with? What about that pen’s retracted nib? What if she was like, going to the dry cleaners and whipped that pen out when she got there and signed the check and the dry cleaner touched it and then got earwax on YOUR CLEAN PANTS? Just something to consider on the 36, surrounded by crazies.