First of all, let’s give a hand to Barrister Mobutu Sese-Seko. I, for one, truly appreciate him taking time out of his horrendously busy schedule bilking old people for their pension checks to help tie up a few loose ends around here concerning Those Hit Generating Schemes That Shall Not Be Named. So thank you Barrister, may you have long life and health in whatever third world hellhole you are practicing your art of scammery from.

Secondly! This is where I answer this guy’s and this other guy’s questions about the tuberculosis. Yes, I was really, truly, actually exposed to TB. I’m taking pills for it until September (originally my doc recommended nine months but recently reduced my sentence to six.) No alcohol, processed cheeses, raw sushi, aspirin, hookers, Malawi nationals or anything more fun than red flavored Jell-O until I’m done with the meds.

You read that right. No alcohol. And it’s only April. Don’t come near me or I’ll stomp on your toes.

Thirdly, I can’t be the only participant in the 2008 Northern California Invitational Celebrity Death Prognostication Challenge who was absolutely pissed to read this.

Fourthly, I would like to publicly thank Blondie for sending me a link for a local freelance job writing web copy for a Davis-based company that makes eco-friendly burial containers. I submitted my resume last week and if I somehow manage to land the contract I’m sooo sending you a bottle of wine.

Fifthly, I would like to whore Jay out. Again. Just because he whores me out so much and I fear a breach in our informal mutual pimping agreement might result in bad juju.

Sixthly, I would like to thank Cranky Prof for being so cranky. And professorial. I love you. And your blog.

Seventhly, an update on the funeral sciences program. Life has been busy on the back forty of American River College where the FSE headquarters are housed in the Winchester Mystery Trailer. We’ve quizzed. We’ve tested. We’ve grilled our professors for gory details about stuff like purge, skin slip, and anal leakage. We’ve covered areas of the funeral business in deliciously gruesome detail that makes the Faces of Death people look like amateurs.

…we’ve even moved bodies around. Ok, not real bodies… fake ones. Like the mortician’s equivalent to those plastic dummies that you practice CPR on.

Classes have been great, especially considering that I’ve spent the entire semester sitting next to the Men of Mortuaries calendar boy Mr. February. No joke.

So anyway, Mr. February is an apprentice embalmer in San Francisco and has more good death industry stories than you could shake a dismembered arm at. Oh, and he also does a mean cha-cha with our program’s permanent resident, Senor Esqueleto:

Need I say more? This semester’s been the best time I’ve had in school since starting Kindergarten as a wee Death Lass.

In return for my cooperation with the medical establishment I now have nice little bruised-looking spots on my arms from the PPD tests, a chest x-ray, and the best souvenir of all is my nine-month supply of medication which cannot be combined with tylenol, codeine, or alcohol. Yippee!

Luckily I’m neither symptomatic or contagious. Not that those facts have kept me from having a little fun at the expense of a couple of my more germ-phobic friends who typically hover around DEFCON-2 depending on what the bird flu’s doing that day. You have to know these women to truly appreciate how little it takes to send them over the edge; they go through gallons of hand sanitizer a day and – with the help of the Discovery Health channel – have diagnosed themselves with everything from ebola to parvo since their little disease-filled worlds are not species-specific.

Anyway, now that the cat is out of the bag you can tell that their polite upbringing is engaged in a constant battle with their fear of being lathered in my consumption-riddled germs. They’ve both seen Tombstone and neither wasted much time letting me know that Doc Holliday? He was a real guy. And he really did die of tuberculosis, you know. Witnessing their compulsion to be polite war with their desire to run screaming from me in a salvo of Lysol is kind of like watching a crowd of Germans at a malfunctioning street light; something stronger than logic holds them to that street corner despite the fact that the blinking hand has been red for fifteen minutes straight and there’s no danger in sight.

If I were possessed of a meaner spirit I might not be satisfied to simply let them shield their children from my TB-infected gaze or refuse to shake my hand. If I were meaner I might be tempted to experiment with several fake coughing fits. As it is I’m going to have to settle for tripping the NetNanny in their heads by showing up to car pool wearing fish net stockings.

God I love Mormons.

Care to guess who’s bloodstream is more polluted than a riverbed in a banana republic? If you guessed that my PPD tests came back positive for T-freaking-B then give yourself a cigar.

So I’m standing there in the doctor’s office while he delivers the “What We Are Going To Do Now” speech when the guy decides to have a little fun. Maybe he’s sadistic. Maybe he knows that I’m not the suing type. Or perhaps he spied the bookmarked copy of Stephen King’s “The Stand” that I had tucked under my arm. Whatever the reason, the doctor finishes his spiel, looks at me innocently and asks, “Do you have any questions?”

Hell yeah I had questions! I had just been told I had been infected by the same microbacteria that killed George Orwell and if I was going to end up coughing up a lung and writing a bunch of paranoid rants about Stalinism I figured my family and I needed some info. Amazingly enough, the only thing that came out of my mouth was:

“So-um, uh…. what happens when someone gets something like this?”

At which point he gives me a deadpan gaze and answers, “I don’t know. The last outbreak on U.S. soil resulted in something like a thirty-five percent casualty rate.”

“Are you serious?”

“No.”

And then he grinned.You know what? I bet that bastard has spent his entire career waiting for my dumb ass to come along. And you know what else? If I had been him I would have wanted to say the same thing.