An anonymous reader e-mails: “I want you to write a whole blog post about me. I know it may be tough, but you can do it.”

Well, here’s what I can tell you so far:

Based on the spacing and font of the message I received from you, you use a Mac or some other Apple device to read my blog. Statistically, that means there’s a roughly two-in-three chance that you prefer Pepsi to Coke, but will take RC over either of them. You spent an inordinate amount of time searching my blog for posts that contain the terms “octothorpe,” “capitalism,” “school,” “nougat,” and fourteen other terms that make me think it’s been too long since your last trip to see the kind men in white jackets. The time you spent typing the message (my stat program logs the time between clicks) strongly suggests you have stubby fingers and freakishly long humerus bones.

There’s more: you have a supernumerary feature that you’re too embarrassed to mention to anyone. You’re fluent in two languages, but one of them will go extinct in less than fifty years– and for a second there, you were worried that it might be your fault. It won’t be. You learned to read at age two, but you wasted it reading romance novels from grocery stores. You hate creamy peanut butter. You like ketchup on your steaks, which you always order well-done. You never believed in Santa, but you do believe in ghosts and hope to be the first person to walk on Jupiter. You refuse to sit in rocking chairs because the motion reminds you of the open sea. Your eyes change color when you’re asleep. You know six fractional approximations of pi that are accurate to six decimal places, but you think spiders are insects and you think Roger Moore was better than Sean Connery.

But to say much more than that would be presumptuous, since all I have is the one e-mail to go on.

“Danford” writes:

Being an Econ man and all I would like to know your opinion on the refs lock out in the NFL. Are the owners being greedy??? Or are the refs asking to much to work 16 sundays a year??? Also do you feel it’s affecting the game??? I would just truly appreciate if you wrote a blog on this issue.

I don’t think the owners were being greedy. The owners didn’t want to pay more, and didn’t think they had to pay more to maintain a particular level of officiating. They found out the hard way that they were wrong, at least when it came to how happy the players/coaches/fans were with the officiating. I don’t know whether the lockout affected the owners’ revenues, and I don’t know whether any statistical analysis has shown the replacement refs to be worse than the real refs.

It has affected the game– there hasn’t been this much whining by the players, coaches, and fans since the ’87 strike. What a bunch of ninnies.

But again, there’s nothing greedy about thinking you can afford to pay no more than you have to for anything. If you use a coupon at the store, are you being greedy? If you shop around for a good price, are you being greedy?

I don’t think the refs were asking for too much… but that’s because the owners obviously ended up willing to pay them more, if I understood the terms of the cease-fire correctly. You’re not asking for too much money if somebody’s (eventually) willing to pay you. If nobody’s willing to pay you, then you asked for too much.

Here’s what really matters: the Bears were 2-1 with the replacement refs. If they do worse now that the real refs are back, then the real refs are overpaid.

By the way, stop using so many question marks, they don’t grow on trees.

Late Wednesday afternoon, I woke up from a nap, put in my contacts, and felt something under my left eyelid. For the life of me, I couldn’t get it out. Rolling the eyelid didn’t work. Moving the contact around in hopes of dislodging the offending lash or particle didn’t work. Eye rinse didn’t work. Shower didn’t work. Holding my eyeball open under the faucet didn’t work. Nothing worked, but I found that leaving my contact in reduced the irritation slightly. I assumed that meant that there was a particle, a lash, or a scratch or a scar on my eyelid, and that my contact blocked it from touching my eyeball directly. I was sort-of-right.

I’ve had a broken toe, a twice-broken finger, deep gashes on my hands from art-class accidents with paper cutters and linoleum knives, and all kinds of aggravating aches and pains and tweaks from 30 years of soccer. I’ve sliced my tongue on a broken tooth. I’ve had boiling water poured on me, which grafted my shirt to my skin. I burned my hands on a wood stove, badly enough that I couldn’t use them for weeks and my three-year-old handprints are still on that stove. I’ve suffered acid burns. I’ve suffered caustic burns. I’ve had concussions. I’ve been stabbed*. I’ve been shot**. I was nearly suffocated by an out-of-control tugger while nearly being impaled on the axle of a giant spool of cloth behind me. And yet none of those pains matched that induced by whatever-it-was under my eyelid that I just couldn’t get out.

It was the most maddening sensation I’ve ever felt. I couldn’t get to sleep. I felt like Poe’s narrator and the old man with the vulture eye, and if I could have made it stop by dismembering myself and nailing myself under the floorboards, I would’ve.

Okay, that might be overstating it… but I did sterilize the ice cream scoop in case worse came to worst. Twas a shame I’d be losing my good eye.

I think I managed to get two hours of sleep that night, and woke up with my eye virtually sealed shut. I drove to school the next day, which was foolish– not the school part, but the driving part. Good thing everyone got out of my way in time. As soon as I got to work, I knocked on every door in the science wing, looking for an emergency eye wash. It helped a teensy bit. I suffered mightily throughout the day, high-tailed it to the eye doctor after work, prayed that I’d get there before the doctors went home, and practiced cursing them out if they left before I arrived.

The doctor put some stuff in my eye, had a look under a bluish light, and told me I had a corneal abrasion. Whatever relief the contact lens provided was due to the lens protecting the abrasion from the eyelid. He dilated my pupil and put some drops in my eye, which eased the pain tremendously. He wrote me a prescription for antibiotic drops to be administered hourly, and told me to check back the next day and the day after that.

Departing his office with virtually no pain in my eye was bliss, until I got outside. I’ve had my eyes dilated before, but apparently not like this. Right (normal) eye: blue, peaceful skies after a storm had cleared. Left (treated) eye: Hiroshima.

I slept like a log that night and woke up refreshed. Checked my eyeball in the mirror, and found that it was still dilated. Not nearly as red as it had been, and essentially pain-free, but freakishly dilated. That afternoon, the doctor assured me that that was normal.

Two more visits to the doctor, and everything appears to be all set. My pupils are normal again, and my eye feels fine, though not quite totally normal: I still have to magnify the text on this page to read it. I can’t wait for them to invent functioning prosthetic eyes, so if this ever happens again I can just pluck out my old eyeballs and implant new ones.

* On accident. With an X-ACTO knife.
** Not really.

Dear Mayor Emanuel,

Hear me out:

I currently teach in Duval County Public Schools. My base salary last year was approximately $41,000 due to having a bachelor’s degree and being in my tenth year of teaching .

The base salary of a full-time appointed teacher in a 38.6-week position in Chicago Public Schools with a bachelor’s degree and 10 years in the system was over $70,000 last year .

Your school system offered a nice raise to the teachers union, which responded by going on strike. I’ll take the union at its word that the strike is actually a response to the charter school movement and the evaluation system and so on and so forth, but still, it’s a nice raise they turned down.

With all that in mind, I make the following proposal:

Hire me to teach in one of your high schools for $70,000 per year, with whatever benefits you’d give to a tenth-year teacher. My salary will never change–not even for inflation– so that’s $70K this year, $70K five years from now, $70K ten years from now. You can use whatever evaluation system you think is “fair,” you can fire me at will, you can fire me without cause. And if I decide I made a mistake, or become unhappy with the job, or get tired of the snow, fine– I’ll quit, no harm, no foul. We’ll shake hands and that’ll be it.

Just drop me an email, and I’ll have my people talk to your people.

Sincerely,

Vincent D. Viscariello

P.S. Perhaps “sincerely” is a bit of an overstatement since I know you’ll never read this letter or make this deal, and if you did we’d probably both end up floating in the Chicago River with dry-erase markers jammed in our eye sockets. And I’m pretty darn happy with my job down here, so even the sweet deal I proposed might not be enough to pry me away. I guess the point of all this is that it’s been way too long since some of the teachers in your city went hungry.

Since the attacks on the American embassies in Egypt and Libya are reminiscent of the attacks on the American embassy in Iran in 1979, here’s my paranoid election-related prediction of the week:

If Obama loses (my finely tuned prediction algorithm currently places him at a 54.7% probability of reelection), then either Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Condi Rice, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, or some sordid combination of them will be accused of having engineered the September Surprise. “Romney made a deal with the Egyptians [or Libyans or Iranians or Israelis or Martians or fill in whomever your little heart desires] in order to make Obama look wimpy and weak. Romney should be tried for treason.”

If Egypt and/or Libya calm down at any point after the election, that will be construed as proof of a conspiracy. “Romney paid their leaders to incite violence juuust long enough to get Obama out of office,” they’ll say. They’ll follow up with something like “The stability that Egypt [and/or Libya] now enjoys is because of Obama’s earlier work.” The clincher will be when American companies begin investing in Egypt/Libya/both. “The Republicans found a way to pay them off! It’s Reagan, Bush and the CIA all over again!”

They’ll continue with something along the lines of “C’mon, it was on 9/11! That can’t be coincidence!” They’ll find evidence that American businessmen flew out of whatever Middle Eastern country– doesn’t have to be Egypt or Libya– a few days before the attacks occurred, and that’ll be proof that Karl Rove channelled Lee Atwater and Bill Casey and sold meth to the Muslim Brotherhood and used the cash to fund Venezuelan rebels in an effort to overthrow Chavez. There’ll even be a segment about it on Nightline in 10 years, which will be all the proof anyone needs.

Of course, if things go even crazier in Egypt and/or Libya at any point after the election, that will also be construed as proof of a much simpler conspiracy: “Obama was making progress toward peace and then the Republicans undercut him and ruined the whole entire Middle East forever! And they did it just to beat Obama!” And so on.

Dunno whether I’m the first to make this prediction in the wake of yesterday’s attack. I’d like to think that, by making this prediction, I’m not giving people enough credit. We’ll see.