There Are No Facts, Only Interpretations

Sometimes I have trouble figuring out how my brain works. When presented with a body of evidence, my mind will automatically ignore the data and make a beeline for the most insane, baseless conclusion. Once as a teenager, I read the Wikipedia entry for Asperger's Syndrome and became absolutely convinced I was a high-functioning autistic. Though I have a few family members who still believe this might be a possibility, it's obvious my self-diagnosis was unfounded and ridiculous.

My bogus delusions are usually short-lived, but a great source of stress when they present themselves. The most alarming incident occurred during my senior year of college, during finals week. I always seem to get sick at the most inopportune times, and when I started feeling under the weather sometime around day three of finals, I wasn't surprised. I think my body is best equipped for low-impact activities: napping, playing video games, eating party-sized bags of Cheetos in one sitting, stuff like that–and when forced into actual work, is all, "PEACE OUT, HOMIE" and craps out until there's no work left to do. On this occasion, my body retaliated with the most heinous sore throat I've ever experienced. I plugged my illness into WebMD's Symptom Checker, skimmed right past the most likely conclusions, and arrived at the conviction that I had throat cancer.

I presented my hypothesis to the campus physician. She scoffed, but remained cheerful.

"Has your uvula always looked like that?" she asked.

"Looked like what?" I replied, suddenly gripped with the notion that death was imminent. She quickly retrieved a hand mirror from the cabinet, and held it up in front of me. I opened my mouth again. The site was horrifying. My uvula was engorged and as red as a Marxist lobster.

It looked like chewed up bubblegum. It was so bloated and inflamed that it was solidly resting on the back of my tongue, which explained why I'd been walking around campus gagging randomly at passersby. A quick swab test revealed that I didn't have cancer, thankfully, but rather a severe case of strep throat.

The next few days were downright agonizing. I was forced into a mostly liquid diet, as the mere thought of choking solid food down my gullet brought a tear to my eye. I became well acquainted with the Japanese noodle shop down the street. Their udon soup became my main source of nourishment for the rest of finals week. The broth soothed my aching throat, and the soft wheat noodles slid down painlessly.

When the weekend rolled around, I was still morose and sickly. And absolutely engorged with udon noodles. If you suspect this is about to turn into another vomit story, then gold star for you. But let's not get ahead of ourselves just yet.

Breakfast on Saturday morning was more udon soup and a bottle of XXX Vitaminwater. I chose the XXX flavor because of its advertised antioxidants, hoping it might antioxidize my uvula back into the shape of a healthy dangly-thingy. Looking back, I obviously had no idea what antioxidants even were. I still don't, really.

Now, before moving on, I'd like to take a moment and discuss what happens to udon noodles when submerged in dark red Vitaminwater for several hours, so I drew this easy to follow equation:

Keep this in mind as we delve deeper into my defective psyche.

The nausea set in later that morning in the shower. I'd been trying to keep food down all week, but apparently four consecutive days of inhaling noodles had caught up with me. All I can say is that I'm thankful I was alone in that moment, because what ensued must have looked like something out of Japanese fetish porn.

I didn't know what to think, standing there staring down at my lovely little heap of dark red noodles. They looked like earthworms, and for some stupid reason my brain interpreted them to be earthworms. I watch enough sensationalist programming on the Discovery Channel to know that any number of parasitic creatures can live in and on humans, so a belly full of earthworms didn't seem that strange, really. It's hard for me to explain how I manage to assume such idiotic scenarios, but there it was. For several brief minutes on a Saturday morning in May, I truly believed my stomach was full of worms.

I grabbed the antibiotics I'd been prescribed and shakily popped a few, reasoning that since antibiotics killed bacteria, they'd be sure to kill any worms that might be crawling around inside me. I crouched there, naked, mind racing, trying to figure out how worms managed to become present in my belly.

I thought, do worms lay eggs? Did one crawl across my face while I slept and deposit its children into my open mouth? Was the cafeteria food infected? Was I gonna have to go all Erin Brockovich on the lunch ladies?

And then it hit me that of course it was just bloated red noodles, and relief flooded over me. I felt more dumb than anything. Dumb, and disgusted at the prospect of cleaning up noodle barf.

I don't know why my mind involuntarily thinks up the most bizarre scenarios possible, even when the truth is staring me right in the face. I wish I didn't impulsively bypass the obvious and fabricate my own wild fantasies, filling in the gaps with increasingly absurd details until I've convinced myself of the worst. I just don't know. I suppose that's simply the way the cookie crumbles.

And in my head, that cookie is radioactive, riddled with hookworms, and just might give me shark AIDS if I'm not careful.