Tourettes for Dummies

I don't know how I ended up with my husband. Unlike him, I was born deficient in the chromosome that compels people to iron their jeans, organize their 200 cd collection in alphabetical order, and keep their laundry out of mountainous piles on the floor.

On the other hand, sometime I feel just as crazy as he is. Today, for example, I was sitting in my night class trying not to listen to my professor dry heave streams of words meant to form logical sentences. I was doing everything possible to make the 2.5 hour class go by faster, such as: figuring out when I would be justified in eating another cookie (which I decided was not a hard qt at all -- MORE COOKIEZ!!) and imagining myself wearing my really ugly Christmas sweater from Value Village with knit snowmen and cotton balls sewn all over it.

That's when I got the urge to yell the word "penis" in front of 20 graduate business and law students and one practicing local attorney.

I just wanted to say it once, just once, and then pretend like nothing unusual had just happened.

I mostly wanted to see how people would react. Would they pretend it didn't happen? Would I get kicked out of the room and sent down the hall to the Dean's Office? Oh man, it would have been hilarious.

What stopped me was not my moral compass or social dignity (they are temporarily misplaced along with my ability to buy cookie dough icecream without eating all the cookie dough chunks out). What stopped me was the fact that I knew I couldn't do it with a straight face and because I did not wish to be the first law student preemptively disbarred.