Since I'll be away for a few days and my archives haven't been hooked up yet -- not to mention the fact that I just got home after a 14-hour workday and now I have to pack before getting 6 hours' sleep and driving to LAX in the morning -- I thought I'd put a couple of old favorite entries in here for some of you newcomers who might not have seen them yet. So enjoy, and I'll be back on Saturday. Until then, Lord only knows how I'm going to survive being with my parents in a strange city I've only spent literally an hour in previously and no TV and no computer for 4 days.

Originally posted: January 3, 2002

Growing up with a doctor for a father has its perks. Among them was the ever-popular prescription pad -- but not for the reasons you think, you sicko. I'm neither an addict nor a dealer.

My town's school system implemented this policy when I was in junior high school that if you were to be out sick for a day, a note from your parent didn't count. You had to have a note from a doctor that was written on either doctor's office stationery or a prescription pad, and it never had to be anything really involved -- just something along the lines of "Please excuse [insert child's name] from school on [insert date]. He/she had [insert malady]. Thank you." I guess it was an effort to cut down on kids faking notes from their parents for cutting school. But that was never a problem for me, since I had easy access to a prescription pad. I never really cut school because... well, quite frankly, what would I do for the day? I lived in a small town where you needed a car to get anywhere, plus a lot of people recognized me and knew my parents, so there was a decent chance I would've been spotted had I skipped school. So unless I was willing to hide in the woods for the day, I figured I might as well be in school since hiding in the woods would get kind of boring after an hour or two.

But I did get sick every now and then, and having Dad's prescription pad around saved me trips to the doctor to prove that yes, I really was sick and that's why I was out of school. But I learned early on in life that it's more fun when you play with people's minds, so we had a small game going with the school administrators and to this day, I still don't think they ever caught on. Dad would come home from work, ask me if I needed my excuse note, and when I said I did, we'd come up with something creative and that's what he'd say I had in my excuse note. He'd sometimes pull one of his medical books off his bookshelf and tell me to pick something.

Over the course of a few years, I suffered from 24-48 hour bouts of Ebola, listeria (which, if I recall correctly, is a kind of bacterial food poisoning that sometimes results in explosive diarrhea), hemorrhagic fever (yes, I know Ebola is a kind of hemorrhagic fever, but put "fever" down and it sounds plausible), post-prandial upper abdominal distension (translation: cramps) and many other sicknesses that would usually kill a person or cause hospitalization for at least a week or two. Dad occasionally went outside the bounds of medicine, such as the time I had a case of acute Bucephalus (Bucephalus was a winged horse in Greek mythology), monosodium glutamate (translation: salt), and the famous phenylalanine episode (phenylalanine is a preservative used in soda).

Still trust your doctor and all the scientific terms he/she spouts off?