I knew the sun had gone to my head when I went into gales of laughter, at the coffee shop, over my friend’s comment that they had tons of lepers in Thailand, and she’d knitted bandages for them as a child. Not just “tee-hee” but the silent, red-faced, shaky-bladder’d, table thumping kind that makes you an absolute spectacle, but what can you do?

My weakly gasped defense of “Well, really, who doesn’t find leprosy hysterical?” only cemented my place in that special hell*, but since I haven’t howled like that all week, and hell was a given ANYWAY, I feel no regret. (Fortunately, my friends are used to this sort of random lunacy from me, probably in much the same way that y’all are used to sudden passionate enthusiasms for botflies and the like.) Probably it was Vitamin D shock from sudden sunlight.

I don’t even know WHY it was funny. Leprosy is traditionally as unfunny as diseases get. All I know is that at that moment, in my head, leprosy = pure comedy gold.

*You know, the one we go to for making fun of hideous diseases. I suspect that I’ll spend a lot longer in “phallic rock formation” hell, but I definitely earned a good half-hour of brimstone over coffee.

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