Thin Skinned

The other day, I got a bit of disappointing news. My dermatologist is retiring. I knew she was older than, well, older than me, but it never occurred to me that she was close to an age where one thinks about no longer working. Of course, she might just be young-ish and have had enough. Either way, I wasn’t expecting it. I figured I would continue to see her well after the acne died down and the wrinkles kicked in, after every last mole had been removed, until I too reached the age of retirement.

I received this news from my doctor while sitting on the exam table, wearing only my panties and a white paper sheet that is somewhere between a tablecloth and a street map in both size and ease of unfolding. After she told me, she thanked me for trusting my skin to her for the past few years, complimented my patient style, and left. I sat alone in the exam room and thought sadly about how much I didn’t want to have to start all over with a new dermatologist.

If you think about it, seeing the dermatologist is almost more of an intimate experience than seeing a gynecologist. At the OB/GYN’s office, you get both a paper vest and the paper sheet, and the exam is over before you know it. You spend most of it on your back, staring at the ceiling and avoiding all eye contact while things are done to you. And to the doctor, well, you are just another pair of tits and pussy. Grope, grope, duck bill, extra long Q-tip, a couple of fingers shoved in, mash on the belly a few times, remove the glove, and write a prescription for birth control. An hour wait for a ten minute exam. And ten minutes is being generous.


The skin exam is a whole different story. You get to leave on your panties, but every inch of your exposed skin is inspected. The lights are the brightest fluorescent known to man, and the room is large, allowing the doctor to circle you repeatedly, finding the best angle to really study your blemishes and imperfections. Your scalp is reviewed. Any skin fold is unfolded and ogled. Even your toes are spread apart, the spaces between them scrutinized. And those panties you are allowed to wear? Well, they are pulled down so that even your below the belt can be scanned. If something looks questionable, the doctor pauses for a closer look, touching, spreading your skin flat, and noting it for further intensive review. It’s even less fun than the way I described it. So you can see why it is so important to be comfortable with your dermatologist.


I’ve had my share of unpleasant skin doctors. I had the one who was too busy to wait for the numbing shot to work before she grabbed her scalpel and sliced off my favorite mole on my right ankle. I had one who decided that his nurse could do my body scan for me, not even stopping by to say hello on his way to bill my insurance company for an office visit. I also had the overly cautious one with was a little too eager with the punch biopsy.

A punch biopsy is when the doctor cuts a hole out of your skin with a little cookie cutter type thing, not unlike an ice fishing hole. Your skin plug is sent to a pathologist to be diagnosed, and the dermatologist either stitches you up or, more likely, cauterizes the hole. Cauterizing is a fancy word for burning; they cut you and then burn you, which in a different setting might involved federal hate crime charges. You leave in pain and smelling like barbecue.

Well, this doc was punch drunk over the punch biopsy, and she single handedly reduced my mole count, if you keep count of such things, to a mere five, preferring to cut on me at least once a visit. She took my cute little star-shaped mole off my right hip (too irregular) and also part of my mole near my belly button (too dark) and even my chin mole (actually, that was at my request). I was not a particularely moley person before, but now my skin is strange to me without its usual landmarks.

The very last time I saw her, she gouged something out of the corner of my eye and something else off my left breast. When she finished and left the room, I hopped off the table and looked in the mirror. I had blood dripping both from my breast and my eye. I looked like I had stigmata, crying tears and lactating blood. I was more holy than that Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich sold on eBay.

My current dermatologist, who is retiring, is nothing at all like the others I’ve seen. She is more like your friend’s mom when you were in the fifth grade. She is quiet and slightly nurturing, but knows what she is doing. You can picture her taking a tray of cookies out of the oven more than you can lancing your boil.

Not that she can’t inflict pain too; believe me, she can. My last visit saw her freezing a cluster of pre-cancerous cells off my forehead, a spot I forgot until I scratched it, each and every time for the rest of the day. She also stuck a needle through a clogged pore near my nose and squeezed on it with that little metal stick with the hole on the end, which I am pretty sure was invented during the Spanish Inquisition. (I can’t hear that without thinking of Mel Brooks singing, just so you know.) But she acted like she felt bad about the pain part, an unfortunate result of her treatment.

I wanted to hug her goodbye when she left the room but I was, after all, only wearing a paper sheet. So I just gave a friendly little wave, got dressed, settled my tab at the check-out counter, got in my car, and sat all misty-eyed for a good five minutes. Then I started the car and drove to Target, where I purchased my sunscreen and acne medication. I figured if I start now, then next year I won’t give the new dermatologist a chance to show me how he too can bring me to tears.

So long, Dr. CP.

Trauma or Drama?

Remember about two weeks ago, when my daughter S got her ears pierced for her eighth birthday? Well, after roughly six long weeks of cleaning her ears twice a day and spinning the little gold balls as often as she would let me, the day had come to take out her earrings for the first time. S was very excited to see how her ears had turned out and also to change her earrings. She had received a few pairs of earrings for her birthday, and she was eager to update her look after weeks of the same old gold balls, day in and day out. I too was excited, but it quickly wore off after the ordeal I endured that very afternoon.

S decided she wanted to change her earrings on a Sunday morning. She shared her intentions with me about ten minutes before we had to leave for Hebrew school, which would make any other mom with a back bone say no. Since I am an invertebrate, I attempted to make her fantasy a reality.

We stood next to each other in front of the mirror in my bathroom, armed with some cotton balls and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. I pinched one gold ball between the fingernails of my right hand and reached around her ear with my left.

She grabbed that arm firmly and said, “Let’s do this after Sunday school instead,” her eyes wide with fear.

“You got it!” I chirped, removing my pincers from her ear lobe.

When she came home from her morning activities, she forgot all about the earring changing. We busied ourselves with lunch and last minute homework before sneaking upstairs to watch a movie on the big screen. After she watched the movie and I had a delicious nap (nothing lulls me to sleep faster than a Disney musical), I went to my bathroom. S shadowed me there and sat patiently on the edge of the tub while I finished and washed my hands. And it was just pee, for your information.

“Hey,” I said. “Why don’t we change out your earrings now?”

S stood up quickly. “No, I don’t think so,” she said politely, as if I offered her hot tea. “I think we should wait another two weeks.”

“No, we really ought to do it now. We need to see how they turned out, see if they are lopsided or crooked.”

“Could they be, really?” Eight year olds are so gullible.

“Nah, sweetie, I’m just messing with you. But we should see if they are infected. I’ll put the same ones back in if you like. We don’t have to change your earrings today, just take them out and give them a good cleaning.”

“I don’t want to,” she said. Me neither, I thought.

“Come on, S, let’s get it over with. Then we can make sure they are healing okay, that they aren’t infected.”

“I don’t want to,” she said again.

“Look, S,” I tried to maintain my patience. “I really think we need to clean them. What if your ear is about to fall off?”

Her hands shot up to the sides of her head. “No.”

I don’t know why I engage in a battle of wills with S. You would think I would have learned by now that is S doesn’t want to do something, she isn’t going to, not without a fight. And I’m not talking about a little spat. I am talking Sparta versus Xerxes’ army battle. Which, oddly enough, I am never quite in good enough shape for.

“Get over here and let’s do this. One,” I counted.

“No!” S said.

“Two.”

“No!”

“Three,” I said. Now, get over here.”

S started to cry. She slowly walked over to me, trying to keep her ears covered. I moved her hand away from her right ear and got a good grip on both the gold ball in the front and the earring back and pulled as gently as I could, given my unexpressed rage. But it didn’t matter; she still howled as if I had ripped off her ear, which I was tempted to do. Her earring popped right out, and immediately blood began trickling out of the hole. S saw me dab at her precious body fluid and freaked out.

“Owww!” she screamed. “It’s bleeding.”

“Stop it!” I yelled back. “I have to clean it. Stay still!”

I tried to hold her arm down so I could swab up the blood. I peered at her new ear hole, which looked like it had something stuck in it. Upon closer inspection, I realized it was a hair. One of her thin, blond, long head hairs had wormed its way through her fresh piercing. I pulled on it, but it wouldn't give. Then I tugged on it until finally it came free, pulling a thick string of pus with it.

“See?” I said, throwing the putrid hair in the sink. “It was infected!” I was tempted to gloat, but I quickly remembered what I was gloating about.

S just cried harder. I squeezed her earlobe and more pus oozed out the back. I took out the hydrogen peroxide and dabbed at it some more. I squeezed and dabbed and squeezed and dabbed until only blood came out. I wiped off the stem of the gold ball and quickly shoved it back in the ear hole before she could block my hand. More blood seeped out.

About this time, my husband joined us to inquire about all the ruckus. S and I were yelling back and forth, me trying to convince her we had to clean the other ear and her voicing her dissent. Seeing us with our lids flipped made him flip his lid too, and pretty soon we were all screaming at each other.

“You’re the one who wanted to get your ears pierced!” I screamed at S. “Now stay still and let me clean your hole!”

My husband stood behind her and pressed her arms to her sides, much like he does to the cat when it’s claw-trimming time. S tried to struggle but I quickly got that earring out. At least the right side wasn’t infected. She screeched at the top of her bronchial tubes, crying uncontrollably, “Don’t put it back in! Dooonnn’t!!”

“If I don’t, that hole will close up, and I am not about to take you back to get them re-pierced. So stay still or this will only hurt worse.”

We fought, me trying to stick her earring though the pierced hole, her turning her head so I missed. Finally, I triumphed. My husband released her and she fled the room, hysterically sobbing and hyperventilating.

I did leave out parts of the story. Like the part where she screamed in my face. And the part when my husband screamed in her face. And the part where I screamed in her sister’s face when she burst in the bathroom and screamed in mine about what was going on. The part where I am sure the neighbor’s heard all the yelling. And the part where we all piled in the car afterwards and drove to my in-law’s house, where we proceeded to act as if nothing traumatic happened.

And traumatic it was. Not foot binding or genital mutilation traumatic. But bad enough that S swore she would never get anything pierced again. Which is fine by me. I prefer her eyebrows, nostrils, nipples, navel, and labia remain unscathed and unpunctured for the rest of her life.

Two days later, she asked me if I would put in her new blue earrings. I did.

“Well, that was easy,” she announced, skipping out of the room.

Was it, really?

Will Work for Food

Remember when companies used to advertise by sandwich boards? Me neither. It was a concept way before my time, but I recall seeing people pacing a side walk in front of a restaurant in an old black and white movie or two. I assume that having a live person walking the street to market your business wasn’t very cost-effective, so gradually, over time, less and less people would stand on the streets.

In their place came a new age of signage and advertising. Bigger and brighter billboards and neon signs in front of restaurants. More ads in newspapers and magazines than articles. More commercials on television and radios than programs or music. Advertising leaked over the back of bathroom stall doors, free t-shirts at charity events, and even product placement in movies. With the invention and popularity of the Internet came a whole new era of advertising, from spam email to pop-up ads and even ad and spy ware. It seems today you can’t even take a shit without some company wanting to sponsor it.

With this constant barrage of marketing and the amount spent on ads, you would think that the little guy would miss out on his piece. But lately, that’s not the case. As the bad economy stays bad, and as sales stay low, businesses are more eager than ever to show themselves in a new light while creating new jobs. Yes, my fellow Americans, we are on the verge of a new era, a throwback to happier, simpler times: the age of the street hawker.

A street hawker is one of those ass clowns you see on the street corners advertising businesses. Lately, everywhere I drive, I see some poor shlub standing outside, braving the elements in order to entice me to eat at Moe’s or get my checks cashed for a nominal fee at some establishment other than a bank. Every weekend, the street corners are practically littered with them, leaving barely enough room for the vagrants and panhandlers.

These jobs have got to pay less than minimum wage since practically no skill set is required other than standing, sitting, and occasionally breathing and waving. Think about it. If you are standing out in the rain, wearing an anorak you snagged at the Goodwill and holding up a sign for an unfinished wood furniture store, you pretty much have hit rock bottom. You've used up all your second chances.

And it’s not like I see one or two such individuals out there on any given day, camped in their portable chairs with the going out of business signs propped against their legs. It is literally every time I drive anywhere, my town, the suburbs, near the mall, in a bigger city. They don’t entice me to buy anything, although I do enjoy tootling my horn at the Chick-Fil-A cow. Mostly, they just make me feel sad for them, these people whose lives clearly did not turn out the way they expected.

Sometimes, you can see the disappointment on that person’s face, as he or she stands on a street corner, chain smoking cigarettes while letting you know it’s 2 for 1 night at the Lenny’s Sub Shop. Other times, the sign person is overly enthusiastic, like the dude outside Verizon, moon walking on the turn lane median. Once I even saw someone sporting a rainbow clown wig. Can you think of a less effective marketing tool than a rainbow clown wig?

But my favorite street hawkers are the ones in costumes. On my last visit to Atlanta, I was surprised and delighted to see a larger than life leprechaun offering to buy up unwanted gold.

“Is that a leprechaun on the side of the road?” I asked my sister, who sat next to me in the car.

“I believe so,” she replied, less shocked than I. She must see him every day. My leprechaun encounters are generally confined to the boxes of Lucky Charms at the grocery store as opposed to standing outside of one.

Both in my town and in Atlanta I have seen ecstatic women dressed as the Statue of Liberty, standing outside of a tax preparer’s office. They are dancing and carrying on, even though no music is playing outside of their own heads. Obviously, I don’t remember the tax office name, only the crack whore standing in front of it, so as a marketing ploy, it didn’t work, now did it? But those Statues of Liberty? Whoo, I can’t forget them! They dance and smile and wave like this is the best job ever. And maybe it is since it doesn’t involve sucking a dick for some rock.

I don't know a single person who ever decided to stop and do business based on a street hawker. They certainly make driving around more interesting, especially since driving while texting is so frowned upon. But don't think for a minute that I don't point out each and every one of those individuals to my children as a reminder to do well in school. Except for the Chick-Fil-A cow. Who doesn't want to be a cow when they grow up?

The King of Kings' Thing

It might seem too late after Mardi Gras for a King cake story, but it is still Lent, so deal with it.

My husband came home from work last week with the remnants of a King cake that someone sent to his office quite a bit after Mardi Gras. Apparently, the individual who sent the cake is something of a big Mardi Gras fan; he goes to New Orleans almost every year. He routinely sends King cakes to people, only not in a timely fashion, so they arrive some time after some people have already given up sweets for Lent, which is never an issue in my house. My husband and daughters enjoyed a piece of the cake after dinner, their mouths discolored from the combination of purple, yellow, and green sugars melting in saliva. There was one piece of cake left, which my husband ate much later as his late night snack after everyone else had gone to bed.

The next night, while getting ready for bed, my daughter, S, asked where the rest of the King cake went.

“In my belly!” my husband answered in his best Fat Bastard voice.

“Well, who got the baby?” S wanted to know.

She referred to the little plastic baby baked inside every King cake. I never understood why a King cake has a baby hidden in it, so I had to ask an expert. I checked with my friend, RC, who has excellent King cake credentials. Not only is she Catholic, but she is also from New Orleans. She told me the deal with the King cake baby. Apparently, he is supposed to represent Christ, which I find a tad on the creepy side. I don’t want Jesus baked in my cake. Let Him stay in those communion wafers which will never pass my lips. But a fancy coffee cake doesn’t seem quite like what people had in mind when they say God is everywhere.

RC told me that there is also a tradition that the person who finds the baby in the cake has to buy the King cake the next year. So not only is the baby Jesus hidden in the King cake, but if you are the one who almost breaks your tooth on Him, your big fat reward is to buy the next round. Some prize that is.

Anyway, back to the baby my husband found in his piece of King Cake that he enjoyed as his late night snack.

“What did you do with it?” S asked him.

“I left it on the coaster in the bonus room,” he said.

Both my daughters scrambled down the hall like they were searching for the afikoman. (Ha! A Jew joke in the middle of a baby Jesus story!) E got there first and came sprinting back down the hall with baby JC in her fist.

“Let me see Him!” S screeched.

E handed Him over to her, and the two of them examined Him while I washed my face. I could hear them whispering and laughing, since an 8 and 10 year old whisper is still a good ten decibels over a quiet speaking voice.

“What’s so funny?” I asked them while I dried my face with the hand towel.

“He’s naked,” S said.

“So? He’s a baby. What do you want, a baby with a dirty diaper in your cake?” Comments like these are why my kids think I’m weird.

“Well, you can see his, you know,” E said.

“His what? His butt?” I asked.

“No, His wiener!” S screamed.

“You don’t say. Let me take a look at that thing.” E dropped the baby in my palm and I looked closely, inspecting the plastic molded area between JC’s chubby baby legs.

“Kind of,” I admitted. “It might just be a lump, from how it was made."

“Nope, I don’t think so,” E said authoritatively. “That is definitely a wiener.”

“How can you be so sure?” I asked foolishly. “How many wieners have you seen, exactly?” My husband, at this point, had clearly left the room, although his body was still there, applying toothpaste to the Sonic Care toothbrush.

”Well, none in person, other than Daddy’s,” she admitted.

“Stop looking at it,” my husband said. For the record, he was dressed the entire time this conversation took place.

“Remember when S was in the Nutcracker?” E said.

“Yes, I do,” I said.

“Well, those boy ballerinas wear those tights, the white ones, and they’re so tight, and…”

“You can see their wieners through their tights?” I asked incredulously. Clearly, I was not living up to my aspirations as a cougar if I had not even noticed teenage wieners at the ballet. Not only did I not observe said wiener action, but I had to learn about it from my 10 year old daughter. And here I thought we were trying to expose our children to the beauty and art of dance.

“You can’t help but look at it,” S chimed in. “It’s all big and out there.”

My husband ended the conversation by plugging up S’s pie hole with the toothbrush. By the time we finished with the bedtime routine stories, the baby Jesus, His wiener, and the last piece of King cake had long been forgotten. In fact, I have no idea where that baby ended up, although I have a feeling he is lurking in a little girl’s bedroom, to be taken out and studied when that little girl thinks no one is looking.

A Happy Ending with Every Hand Roll

Can you think of a better way to turn the worst day around than sushi and sake? It doesn't fix the reason for the day sucking, but it sure makes you forget about how bad it was. Especially if it's dollar sushi night and you have enough sake, which the other night, I did.

I joined my sister, LM, and her family for a lovely sushi dinner following a truly horrible day. We went to a small local Japanese restaurant, half of which had hibachi style dining, the other half regular tables. We didn't have the energy for a show, so we went to the boring side and promptly sat down and ordered up some sake for the both of us. I guess the waiter could tell it was a rough day because he didn't ask what size we needed. He just brought out two large steaming hot volcanic rock bottles with little matching cups. It was too hot to pour, but not if you wrapped the bottle first with a napkin, because who wanted to wait for it to cool down before getting a drunk started?

We also started ordering lots of sushi since the dollar night special was ending in ten minutes and we were still waiting for LM's husband and son to arrive. California rolls, spicy tuna, shrimp tempura rolls, masago, tamago, all the agos. We placed our order with only seconds to spare, and right after the rest of the family arrived, the waiter came to our table carrying a gigantic bamboo boat, its deck covered with brightly colored sushi with its little accompanying piles of pickled ginger and spicy wasabi paste.

"Hey, I always wanted my sushi on one of those big boats!" my sister exclaimed, aided by the sake. "He needs to make a boat noise to go along with that thing." The waiter tried to clear a space for the platter in the middle of the table. "Can you make a boat noise?" LM asked him directly.

Her youngest son pleaded with her to be less obnoxious, or at least quieter about it.

"Ooo-oh," the waiter said, with the best imitation of a foghorn ever done with a Japanese accent.

LM and I clapped our hands excitedly over our victory and descended on the sushi like 17 year locusts on a field of grain.

After that was finished, we ordered another round of sushi. LM's husband and oldest son ordered Thai food, which isn't Japanese, by the way, yet consistently seems to be available at some Japanese restaurants, as if offering other Asian food is their idea of fusion cuisine. Anyway, the waiter brought out the Thai food before arriving with another boat load of sushi, but this time he made more of a "choo choo" sort of sound instead of the foghorn from before.

"Hey, that sounds like a train!" I protested. "That's not a boat sound." He smiled sheepishly and shrugged his shoulders. My youngest nephew, SM. looked like he was experiencing intestinal discomfort, when in actuality he was just mortally embarrassed.

While we continued to devour the ridiculous amount of sushi we ordered, my oldest nephew, GM, excused himself to use the restroom. He returned moments later and reported," That was the weirdest bathroom I have ever been in."

"Why?" I asked. "What made it weird?"

"Well, it had a Victoria's Secret catalog and a bottle of hand lotion in it." My nephew is a teenager. He totally knows what that combination means.

"Oh, this I gotta see," I said excitedly.

"Yeah, take her to the boy's room and be the look-out," LM added.

So GM and I scooted around to the hibachi side of the restaurant and through the cloth panels that covered the entrance to the bathrooms. I took a quick glance around to make sure no one was watching us, and then my nephew opened the door and I darted inside. Not just one bottle of lotion, but two were on a small table beside a basket with the lingerie catalog.

We went back to the table and had a seat. "Indeed, he is correct," I said. "It appears to be a welcome respite spot from a boring day at the sushi counter."

LM and I showed an unprecedented level of self-control and did not continue to make jokes about what takes place in that bathroom. No comment about being surrounded by fish odor all day. No joke about the creamy sauce that is sometimes squirted all over a specialty sushi roll. Not even a dig about employees washing their hands before returning to work. Nothing but a little snickering and exaggerated eye movements.

We left the waiter a big fat tip for all the harassment, but really, we weren't so bad. For about an hour, we forgot how bad the bad day was, because of some fermented rice juice, cheap raw fish, and evidence of self-love in a public restroom. Who could ask for anything more?

Enough is Enough

Is anybody else happy that the Olympics are over? Like many people, I get excited every four years when the Winter Olympics roll around, and even more excited when that flame is extinguished. Normally, I’m not much of a sports fan. I’ve had my fair share of kids’ soccer games and all day college football tail-gates, and in both scenarios, I was caught sneaking a book on more than one occasion. The Winter Olympics, though, are different. With the except of hockey, bobsled, and curling, which is more like a housekeeping event than an actual sport, the majority of the sport events are not team based. Instead, they are a culmination of individual skill, technique, and luck.


Abnormal teenagers from around the world converge to perform their stupid human tricks in order to get a medal doing something they can only do for a short time in their lives, something that most people could give two craps about. But that’s okay. We come together in this great show of national pride, putting ideological differences behind us in the name of good sportsmanship and friendly competition. Too bad our governments can’t take a lesson from our athletes.


My favorite event is definitely speed skating. The skate blades are insanely big, the outfits nut-huggingly tight, and the drama high. I am fascinated by American short track speed skater Apolo Ono, both because of his ability to squeeze by spectacular crashes and his oddly orange soul patch. His head hair is brown, and that thing on his chin looks like some spilt tomato soup. I also enjoy long track speed skater Shani Davis. He looks like Frozone from the Incredibles in his sperm like outfit when he takes the ice.


Olympic hockey is not as much fun to watch as NHL hockey because there is less fighting. And all that damn figure skating. Women skaters, which is generous since most of them have yet to start their periods, don their most tiny of skirted spandex outfits and twirl around. The male skaters are like contestants on a gay reality show on ice. Whoever puts on the most flamboyant performance wins. You go for the gold, girl!

Ice dancing, on the other hand, is less like a sport and more like a Saturday Night Live skit. It has a whole element of the creepy, with its combination of bizarre costumes, kitschy choreography, and all too common brother-sister pairs. The oddest performance was the Russian pair of Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin, with their aboriginal costumes that made them look like they were only donning body paint and loin cloths. The only thing missing was black face.


The rest of the sports take places outdoors, as they should. Luge seemed to get less coverage after the tragic accident that killed Nodar Kumaritashvili of Georgia, which the national news programs thought would be appropriate to show during the dinner hour. Shocking? Yes, but more so that it happened in luge and not skeleton. Flying down an icy track at 90 MPH is dangerous, but doing it head first seems a tad bit more likely to have a bad ending.


Look at some of the other crazy ass sports: downhill skiing, mogul, slalom, super G. I don’t even know what half of that means, but I am pretty sure my body wasn’t meant to do any of it. How do I know? Because I fall down my own stairs. I trip over uneven sidewalks. Strapping sharp planks on my feet and careening down a hill doesn’t sound like it is in my best interest. But I like to watch others do it, especially when it results in a spectacular crash that doesn’t cause any long term physical damage. It’s like America’s Funniest Home Videos, only without the laugh track.
Snowboarding is an extension of skiing, but I don’t like it as much. It’s all a bunch of cold blooded skate punks, and this year their official uniform was baggy jeans and plaid flannel. I’m pretty sure a snow covered half-pipe doesn’t even exist in nature. Go back to the Winter X Games, dudes.


So honestly, the excitement of the Olympics was gone after the first four days. I am more than ready to see a new episode of 30 Rock by now. It’s March, for God’s sake; I don’t want to look at more snow, I want some sunshine and a short sleeved shirt. And another four years to get excited about sports that I can’t even stomach for two weeks. The closing ceremony shouldn’t be inflatable beavers and bad singing. It should be the loading of duffel bags into buses. It’s not graduation it’s the last day of camp, and we are all ready to go home.