Grounds for a Lawsuit

When you finish reading this, you'll realize that you just read a really, really bad pun.

In other news, I have worse luck with my eyes than Jaleel White. Some of you may remember late last year when an unfortunate trip home from the beloved Thirsty Ear disasterously ended in a black eye and a fractured foot after I gracefully tripped and fell onto my own fist. Thankfully, people assume most of my injuries are related somehow to hockey (which I haven't even played in three months, partly in fault to my unfortunate limbo accident) and not the usual first inclination to lean toward "abusive boyfriend".

I used to have this computer game was sort of educational but mostly just an excuse to laugh at circus freaks. It was an interactive carnie game of sorts: a sideshow theatre. The best feature of the CD-ROM (remember the last time you got info off of a CD-ROM?) was the bio gallery, where you could read all sorts of personal information on the world's most loved circus freaks (My favorite was JoJo the Dogfaced Boy) that included all sorts of colorful adjectives, mostly describing body hair. The most entertaining part of the bios were the descriptions of the gruesome deaths of said freaks. You'd think that they would have passed on due to complications involving the nature of their respective deformities, however, their deaths were even more freak than they were.

JoJo the Dog-Faced Boy Cause of death: Pneumonia.
Lucia Zarate, Puppet Woman Cause of death: Freezing to death when the train she was on became stalled in the Rocky Mountains during a heavy snowstorm.
Admiral Dot Cause of death: After escaping a hotel fire that burned down an entire city block caused by a stray cigarette butt, Dot survived only to contract the flu, which she died from 7 years later.
Topless Hot Dog Cause of almost death: Espresso machine malfunction/explosion.

You get the pun now?

It was a perfectly nice Sunday evening and, trying to save up some money for a venture I am planning, I decided to save a few bones by making myself a mocha at home. My espresso machine just sits in the kitchen next to its stainless steel counterparts, day after day, looking promising and underutilized and I just decided it was time for an espresso.

With a gay barista-like smile on my face, I basked in the rich aroma of the coffee while I packed it into the instrument through which the coffee is filtered (hey, I said barista-like -- I ain't no barista -- that's a whole other language) and sealed it up onto the machine. I steamed my soy milk and decided it was frothy enough when the metal container onto which I was holding became hot to the touch. I started to get pretty excited about my new syrups I'd just bought to add to my anticipated beverage. I switched over from the 'steam' setting to the 'coffee making' setting and heard the machine start to hum. Black, thick brew began to seep from the machine into my two cleverly placed silver cups. The hum started to turn into a slight rattle, and that slow rattle began to grow so loud I furrowed my brow and decided to look at the machine a little bit closer and harder, as if that could suppress the problem.

What happened next, had it been viewed by someone other than myself, might have been the most unfortunately humorous, yet tragic event ever witnessed.

In one swift, 'POP!' the pressure building up within the machine blew off the holder of the coffee grounds, hitting me in the shoulder before flying across the room, right onto the carpet. The force of the release from the machine was swift and strong, and about four tablespoons of scorching hot coffee grounds blew forth onto my clothes, into my hair, and onto my face and hands. I wanted to laugh, but I sort of felt like I might be on fire. As soon as the initial shock subsided, I realized that the coffee grounds on my face were singeing off my skin rather quickly. I was able to paw most of them off of my face in a hurry, however, I'm left with the sort of face people avoid starting directly into.

It, like the black eye, will probably last for a couple weeks. 

Someone, somewhere is laughing. Not me though, because it hurts my face.