Today's WTF moment, brought to you by Miss Tasha

So I’ve been having some wee intermittent neck pain over the last week – nothing major, or even minor really – it’s barely been there. Just once in a great while, a twinge. No big deal, right?

This morning I’m puttering around getting ready to take Kona to the dog park – when suddenly, out of nowhere, the entire right side of my neck AND shoulder/back is in serious pain. Serious as in can-barely-move pain, and I can’t turn my head at all, so I’m moving around like Herman Munster. Fantastic. And now I’m back home after the park, thinking about the shitload of things I need to do...and wondering if popping oxycontin would help at all, or if I should hold off on that, try maybe a hot bath first? Ech, baby steps, who needs them.

It’ll be just SUPER if I’m still dealing with this when I go in this Monday the 18th for my 7:30AM surgery at Prentice with Dr. Fine, where I’ll then be for a couple of days post-surgery, relying on bonbons as a healing mechanism. Just super.

And, we had a question from astute reader D, who asks, “Yo, what’s up with this ticket and the driver’s ed class? Do they make you sit in those clunky simulator things like we all did in high school where you pretend to drive but no one's really paying attention, as the only practice before we were sent out on the road and tried to not kill people?”

To recap, I got this ticket back in October, driving home from a Hawks game at 10:30PM with no other cars around, going down Western at the ungodly speed of 45mph. Now, it tells you something that whenever I explain this to people, I get incredulous guffaws of laughter, since Western is a major street and if you actually drive less than 50mph on it, you’ll get plowed over. But hey, Chicago needs to get its pound of flesh any way it can.

And for some reason, the asshat officer took my driver’s license, after determining that no, I didn’t have a bond card to give him instead. So since then all I’ve had as an ID is the crumpled piece of paper from the ticket, which it amuses me to no end to pull out when I’m at the airport, buying liquor, etc.

As for driver’s ed, the state has a nice racket going on, whereby you can either pay the ticket outright ($95) and have it show up on your record, OR you can pay $40 more, take the driver’s ed class, and maintain a clean record. Which means showing up somewhere on the south side on an inconvenient day and time, or lookie, you can pay yet ANOTHER $20 to take the course online! Which was what I opted for, but in my usual Schleprockian mode of being, for some reason they screwed up and assigned me a class, and then told me I had to pay ANOTHER $20 to be moved to the online class.

Not that this is a racket or anything.