polka dot suitcase

I’m generally not a big television watcher. Not for any moral or intellectual reasons, really. More like a time management reason. By the time the evening TV-watching hours arrive, I’ve still got dishes to scrape and toilets to unplug. Yeah, it’s that glamorous at Chez Polka Dot.

But every once and a while, I’ll plop down and commandeer the remote. Recently, a very strange phenomenon happened. Every time – and I’m not stretching it, I mean every single time, bar none – I flipped on the tube, the moral of the story turned out to be a tapeworm.

Think I’m kidding? Check it out:

• A documentary on parasites
• A medical drama
• A comedy (nothing’s funnier than a tapeworm, after all)
• A reality drama
• Another medical drama (this time it was a renegade tapeworm in the brain…ewwwww)

What was really weird, too, is that every time, young Mister happened to be watching television alongside me. Now, let it be known: He gets very freaked out by the idea of a worm living in a human body. (Can’t imagine why, silly boy.) So after the first show, he’s asking me things at dinner like, “Did you wash your hands before handling this?” or “Was this fish cooked to an internal temperature of 145 degrees?” (He’s very precocious for a 9-year old.)

After the second and third shows, he started getting more serious about it. Like stopping in mid-bite, lowering the fork, and saying — without taking his gaze away from the offending morsel — “Does this look like a worm segment to you?” (For the record: It was a piece of rice.)

After the fourth and fifth shows, Mister and I decided to go off television for a while. Totally coincidentally, we’re also off meat.

But one night when we were out at dinner, I kind of missed the little guy scrutinizing the shank-o-lambs and slab-o-beefs on the buffet. So, like any good mom, I couldn’t resist doing the straw-and-soda worm trick and shouting, “Look out!  There’s a tapeworm!” (People really love it when you talk about parasites while you’re eating.)

So here’s a tribute to the art of creating worms from straw wrappers. Even if you’re an expert with this trick yourself, you gotta love this song…