Fun Size Bytes (from @Tj)

Sometimes 140 characters saves me from myself

Sometimes 140 characters saves me from posting something horribly embarrassing because in the time it takes to try to edit it down, I realize “Wait, I don’t want to tell anyone about that!”

For example, earlier today I felt a sneeze coming and managed to grab a kleenex off my desk just in time.

(Now something you need to know about me: I used to get horrible, horrible, “I’ve been doing coke for too long and my nose is fucked up” nosebleeds all the time. They were so bad and so frequent that in high-school all of my teachers let me leave the classroom without asking permission and just assumed that I had a nosebleed. The nosebleeds have gotten considerably less frequent, but it has made it such that whenever I blow my nose or sneeze, I will—without thinking about it—check for blood. If you don’t know the back-story, it probably just looks like I’m fascinated by mucus but that’s just snot true. We apologize for that last joke.)

Anyway… so I sneeze and—without thinking—look in the kleenex, checking for blood.

Which is when I saw the dead fly.

So for about 10 seconds I thought “HOLY CRAP HOW THE HELL DID I SNEEZE OUT A FLY?!?!?”

Then I realized that what had happened: I had killed a fly with the kleenex earlier, and then set it down, because my office trash-can had been moved somewhere apparently by The Wife who had probably emptied it or some such.

When I was about to sneeze, I grabbed it (having forgotten about its previously-used-state) and used it.

I worked on a few drafts of trying to condense that down into 140 characters, but couldn’t get it any shorter than this:

Was temporarily horrified by the thought that a dead fly had just come out of my nose until I realized I’d used same kleenex to kill a fly hours earlier.

Which was still about 15 characters too many.

By the time I finally came up with a less-than-140 version:

Was temporarily horrified, thinking that a dead fly had come out of my nose, until I realized I’d used same kleenex to kill a fly earlier.

I had already realized: “Wait, that’s disgusting. I don’t want to tell anyone that.”

So I deleted it out of Birdhouse, and now no one will ever know.

Whew, that was close.