No one's needier than this: Me

It really just drives me crazy that I am the only person in the whole world who is defective.

All y'all out there in reader-land run around perfectly normal in your perfectly normal lives and you look at me and you judge me by my cover, wrongly assuming everything is perfectly hunky-normal for me, too. But you're wrong and if you weren't so perfectly, normally self-absorbed you'd see that I have issues. Real issues.

Pam Burke

And don't even think about pulling the "oh how can you say that when your husband only has one arm" card. Get over yourself.

The dude helped ME — single handedly — put my socks on when I was injured last fall. And he can clap. So you shouldn't be speaking of things about which you plainly know nothing. He's obviously just perfectly fine.

Forget about him, focus a little here, and think about me.

I can't touch my toes.

Well, OK, technically I can touch them if I bend my knees, but with my legs straight I can't even cop a feel of my own ankles. Who can't bend down and touch their own ankles? Defective people, defective me, that's who.

I was kind of talking to a really skinny twig of a girl once, and she said, "Stop making fun of me."

So, OK, "talking" isn't quite the right word, but you know what I mean. Besides, the point here is that she also said, "Why is it that everyone thinks it's so wrong to poke fun at people for being overweight or simply comment about their heavy weight, but it's alright to do those things to underweight people?"

I laughed. Really hard. But I think she kind of had a point.

We have Special Olympics, telethons, research centers, foundations and government appropriations for every disability, disorder and disease under the Sun. Why don't we just give the keys to the city to these people who suffer so terribly from being perfectly normal.

Puh-lease. They wouldn't last a day living with my defect.

I want a nonprofit organization to gather donations that will fund sympathetic advertising, and to bring in federal grants to study the scientific explanation for extreme physical inflexibility. I want a celebrity to endorse my cause — a popular one, not some D-list has-been. And I want a toll-free crisis line for me to call when I'm upset.

Where's my support group? Huh?

I have scars, emotional scars from my childhood. All the other kids, the perfectly normal kids, taunted me by doing the splits and back bends and chewing their toenails. All I could do is beat them up, but my stupid parents wouldn't let me because defending my defective honor was "mean." I think they liked the perfectly normal kids better.

Do you know I can't reach far enough behind myself to scratch those really terrible niggly itches on my back? You perfectly normal people have no idea how awful that is.

And ... well ... I guess that's all I wanted to say.

I hope you didn't get this far expecting that I'd have a point.

I just, y'know, had a thought while I was trying to do stupid exercises because some stupid doctor told me that if I did them instead of sitting around I might be able to touch my ankles one day, maybe even my toes. But, of course, he was perfectly normal, so I suspect he's just baiting me into humiliating myself.