November 18, 2006

  • I have to tell you about the crazy shit that happened Thursday night. Mario had a really bad day at work and came home completely stressed out with two bottles of wine. He had just popped the cork on the first bottle when his father called. These are NEVER short conversations. Anyways, his dad is a physician's assistant at Children's Hospital. His specialty is spinal surgery. So, his dad tells him about what happened that day at work: a 10 year-old girl came in to have an operation. Her spine was bent at a 90 degree angle, causing her to walk bent over, facing the floor. She should have had this surgery when she was months old, but her family is poor and didn't have insurance to cover it; Children's did the surgery pro bono. During the surgery, the doctor's discovered that because of her bent-over condition, one of her ribs had grown into and fused to her spine. When they were trying to fix that situation they moved too quickly or something and her spine cracked. The little girl is now paralyzed.

    Ok, so Mario hears this story, gets a bit teary-eyed, and then comes to sit on the couch. He teaches children, if you don't know, so he was just thinking of the girl and was very upset. We started talking about bad things happening to children, and I'm like "I don't care if something happens to a child or an adult, a tragedy is a tragedy. Why is it worse if it happens to a young child? If it happened to a 40 year-old, well they're someone's child, too." Mario starts talking about 'innocence' and stuff like that.

    We decided to just drink and watch TV and forget about the horrible story. So we turn on one of our new favorite shows: Shark (did I mention we have cable now! hel-lo 21st century). So, incase you didn't watch Shark this week, it starts with a beautiful young teenager getting run over by a car. Then her mom comes and sees the body and freaks out. I looked over at Mario and he was not liking this. I was like "Well, let's not watch this, let's watch something funny." I turned on Comedy Central and South Park was on; this should be funny and take our minds off of the paralyzed girl. Alas, the episode was about Stan coaching a Pee Wee hockey team, and one of the players (like, three years-old) has cancer. The sick kid is like "Why does God hate me?" and shit like that.

    We couldn't believe it: we couldn't escape bad things happening to kids. But, we thought, South Park will surely have some big joke at the end to make us feel better, even if it is a sick joke. Well, we were right, there was a joke at the end, but it was pretty sick: The team gets massacred and the kid dies. It would have been really funny if not for the evenings previous occurrences.

    When it ended, we were like "Fuck this!" So we went to Jacob's and did many things to forget what happened. It sort of worked.