Defective August 12, 2005 ~ 9:17 am
Posted by Julie in : Daily Grind , trackback
Me and the scarf that will never die, pulling a Dooce.
My mom called me this morning to inform me of something she’d just heard on NPR on the way to work. The mysterious “they” have done a study and found out that red hair is caused by a defective gene. Apparently my hair was actually trying to be brown. According to the study, redheads are also supposed to have a higher pain tolerance, although my mother laughed at that in my case. She spent many of my childhood ailments calling me Sarah Bernhardt (not to be confused with Sandra Bernhard, although I still mix those two up sometimes).
As she was laughing, I said “Well, don’t you feel awful right now.”
“Not really,” she replied. “Why?”
“Because my whole childhood, you mocked my pain, and now it turns out that when I was whining about pain, I was probably experiencing pain that would have paralyzed a mere mortal.”
“Leave it to you to turn an argument on its ear like that,” she laughed.
“And all those times I whined that you were brushing my hair too hard, you were probably pulling it out by the little bloody roots! I wasn’t just whining about a few little tangles!”
She was howling, so I pulled out my trump card: “Hey, at least I was born defective, I didn’t spend years dyeing my hair in the pursuit of defectiveness! Better born defective than defective by choice!” (No offense, Sloth!)
At this point she was laughing so hard that I thought she was going to wreck the car, and she said “I’ll put that over my mantle!” I offered to cross stitch it onto a sampler for her. Where my initials would usually go, I’m going to put “D.G.” for Defective Girl.
Whaddaya know…in the space of one morning, I have found out that I am defective and found my new superhero alter-ego.
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