Breaking Your Arm - With Style!

Jenny plunged about 5 feet and used her arm to break her fall, which in turn broke her arm. She was prescribed codine, which she said didn't really help, but when she'd call me, it would sound like I was talking to James Brown.

Taking it up a notch, the doctors gave her morphine. One night she called me around 2 am PST [making it 5 am EST] to tell me about the bugs.

In our second semester of junior year and first semester of senior year, Jenny had a hamster named Boss. When she first brought Boss home, she couldn't stop taking cell phone pictures of her and playing the Kelis song, "I'm Bossy." In her cage, Boss would run on her exercise wheel all night long, but we'd consider the sound soothing and adorable. However, by the beginning of senior year, Boss had gained a lot of weight and become crotchety. She'd bite people's fingers and they'd bleed a little, and then I'd get my cell phone and take a picture of it.

Jenny took Boss home with her during winter break. Boss had developed some sort of illness named after a human disease [hamster AIDS or hamster colon cancer] and it caused her to get little red welts on her hamster face. Jenny came home from work one day and her apartment was crawling with fruit flies. She went into her room and discovered that bugs had, at an earlier date, laid eggs in Boss' scabs and that now baby bugs had hatched out and moved onto her walls. Boss gave up soon after that and was buried facing Mecca.

I referred to the incident as, "the time Bossy got infested," and it made Jenny get really mad at me. Boss was her little, sickly baby, whose PetCo inbreeding was more at fault for her unfortunate life than any lack of parenting on Jenny's end.

"Jenny, you're not infested!" I told her on the phone, referring to Bossy, but she didn't seem to notice because of the morphine.
"No! Listen, listen. Okay. So I found this bag of clothes on the street" - Jenny finds really good clothes on the street - "and they were cool, y'know? Like kind of worn, a lot of denim. They're cool. So I bring them home and do you know what I found in the bag?"
What?
"An avocado!" she giggled. "And part of a pretzel!" I could picture her laughing and scratching herself and it made me really want to try morphine.
"Jenny, bed bugs don't eat avocados!"
"But I feel them on me. I'm so itchy." She began to whisper:"And you know how I know it's them?"
How?
"Because I'm scratching but there isn't any red marks."
Is that a thing?
"Now my mom's gonna make me throw out all my stuff. I'm so depressed!"
"You don't have bed bugs. The morphine's making you itchy! If those clothes you found had bed bugs, there would have been a sign like: DO NOT TAKE THESE! THEY HAVE BED BUGS! Like with mattresses."
"But what if someone did it on purpose to be evil?"
"Honestly, those clothes probably belonged to somebody who's dead. Maybe his ghost is making you itchy."

Jenny had a cast put on today and txted me a picture. She opted for a black cast, which I think is really smart because it's comparatively sleek and blocks all the assholes we know from writing, "GR8 JOB" and "I said On The Rocks for AFTER we went skiing."

I clicked around and found a company called Broken Beauties, which sells fashion for the comfort and healing of broken bones. You can order walkers in hot pink, spruce, or sapphire that come with fabric covers made from Hawaiian shirts. There are Crutch Buns, which are velvety covers for the cushion of your crutches, and also Crutch Muffins, which stylishly cover your crutch cushions and the length of your crutch in neutral tones, jungle animal prints, or exciting patterns similar to tapestries you'd find in a world music store.

Aside from the Cast Cuties, which are cast covers for broken toes, the largest selection for communicating personal style is in Cast Covers and Fashion Slings. Broken Beauties can order "Arm Candy" in orchid tie-dye, paisely, pink skulls, or ocelot [which they consider different from cheetah]. The arm slings come in eight prints of floral, four kinds of animal, and two types of optical illusion, plus camo and a skull-and-rose pattern. They totally beat the shit out of the navy blue waterproof slings gimps-of-yore were forced to use to support their injury. There is also a decent sling selection for children, which offers dinosaurs and sporting balls, and a business section with pinstripe, plaid and tweed slings. You can also order Chinatown slings in Gucci or Louis Vuitton.

I finally realized how much middle-aged women like cheetah prints. I thought back to picture frames from beachfront gift shops and jackets designed by Suzanne Somers [for K-Mart?]. Do these ladies wish jungle beasts were not endangered so they could wear the furry spots for real?

Peri just G-chatted me that Jenny plans on having her cast studded with spikes, presumably so she can use it as a late-night weapon, or to make people assume she was crippled in a motorcycling accident. Either way, she already is a Broken Beauty and I'm excited for her to heal.