Nothing Happens At Ten 2009

Peeling Oranges

Last weekend I slashed open the middle finger of my right hand after doing a simple maintenance chore around the house. The cut is deep and it is therefore taking a while to heal. I will not go into the details of how I incurred the injury in an effort to avoid revealing the full measure of my stupidity. That is not the point of this story anyway.

The point of the story is this:

I enjoy eating an orange at work every day. It keeps my plumbing working and it tastes good at the same time. Unfortunately, modern, off-season oranges can be difficult to peel, especially when you are trying to do it with one and a half hands. Getting orange juice into that deep cut, which happened not so very long ago, provides and interesting lesson in pain management (shout and pout and jump about).

So I struggle with the orange while making an obscene gesture with my right hand and hope that the thing doesn't squirt a jet of juice into the wound. I have found that a right hand grip without using the opposable thumb allows me to point the one finger off in a different direction and avoid the pain, even while doing a fairly decent job of peeling the orange.

Which, in short, means that if I go about my business as though I were an ape, things work out OK ... a behavior which got me into this mess in the first place.