Herbal Humor, Week Four

Herbal Healing, Week Four

1. I made it to class early this week. Just another typical night at Bridget’s. I was the third person there. No Birth Control didn’t notice me come in because she was too engrossed in Bridget’s book, The Sexual Herbal, and Grumpy Blonde was upstairs having Tom read her dosha (don’t worry; I intend to try to have my dosha read so I can tell you about it if possible).

2. Hat Girl asks Bridget why she is always wearing purple on Wednesdays. “Ah,” Bridget says. “How keen of you to notice. My closet is color coordinated to align itself with the planets.”

3. Walking to the front of the class, Bridget says, “My, you are a nice-smelling class. I’ll tell you, that’s not always the case in my herb classes. But you all really do smell wonderful.”

3. Bridget tells the Hans Christian Anderson story The Wild Swans in order to illustrate a point about the use of wild stinging nettles. In the story, the princess’ voice is stolen from her. “Have you noticed there are a lot of stories about girls whose voices are stolen? Like The Little Mermaid? It’s interesting, isn’t it?”

“Those stories are obviously written by men,” Argentina says. “You know, a way of teaching girls from a young age to shut up and do what they are told.”

Bridget, looking skeptical, responds, “Well, yeah, obviously Hans Christian Anderson was a man…but…well, I don’t know about that.”

4. Bridget: “I fear needles so much that I can’t even go to acupuncture. I went to acupuncture a long time ago, but I finally told my acupuncturist that unless she started using nitrous oxide like the dentist, I wasn’t going to come back. As far as I know, there are no acupuncturists who use nitrous oxide but let me know if you know of one.”

5. Bridget: “I was on an airplane a couple years back, and the nice young man next to me was reading a Playboy magazine. He was being discreet about it, as discreet as you can be while looking at pornography on an airplane. You know, he wasn’t opening up the centerfold and showing it to me or anything. So, for the first forty-five minutes of the flight, he’s reading his Playboy, and across the aisle from us is a woman with a screaming baby. Finally, the woman starts to breastfeed the baby, and this young man looks over at her and says to me, ‘that’s disgusting.’ I turned to him in shock. ‘Really? She’s disgusting for feeding her child but what you are doing, reading that dirty magazine, is not disgusting? Let me enlighten you on what is disgusting and what is not. You are going to be sorry you’re sitting next to me by the time we land.’”

6. This week in herb class we learned to make sauerkraut. I guess the only ingredients are salt and cabbage. “Salt?” Argentina says. “That’s all you need? Wow.” “No,” Bridget says. “You also need the cabbage. You can’t make sauerkraut with just salt.” “Well, yeah…” Argentina says, her voice trailing off.

7. Bridget’s planner is always open on her lecture table. I was standing by the lecture table taking notes while we were in the kitchen, and I noticed a variety of random things (didn’t read closely enough to remember any of them), but the most ironic was that all day Sunday was blocked off to watch the Broncos game.