'mercury rising'

richmond yesterday was good. i saw almost everyone on my list, though didn't make it downtown for drinks after all. my stamina waned after about 10 hours out ansd about.

the weirdest part of the day, by far, was after dinner at the millicans when tripp and i were just sitting around talking and i had him look at this bump i felt on my head. he investigated it (i imagine this looked something like babboons grooming each other, which is kind of cute), and explained that the bump causing my pain looked like a little spine - prickle type thing. i made him poke at it with tweezers and take pictures of it with his digital camera so i could see it. here's the freaky part, that made me nauseous and feel not unlike the part in "alien" where you first realize the alien is in her stomach. tripp pulled at the spiny thing with the tweezers, it hurt like mad, and in his words, "it made a horn." so what was once a bump on my scalp was now like a bigger cone-shaped pointy thing. tripp was freaked out and dancing around in small panic, which freaked me out further. i kept trying to feel the bump and imagine what it looked like, and when tripp looked at it again after i touched it, the horn had receded back into my head more panic ensued, along with a brief argument about whether or not tripp should wake up his parents to come assess the situation and help.

my already overactive imagination shifted swiftly into overdrive, and i was completely thinking i had a tick or mini-leech on my scalp that might be boring into my brain. i finally let him go wake up his mom, who came into the room, pulled the thing out with a quick tug of the tweezers, and pronounced that it was a thorn, and that she had had a thorn stuck on her just the week before. tripp took pictures of the thorn post-removal, with my fingers and tweezers next to it, for scale. so so weird.