Sticks and stones

So I was at a barbeque last weekend and the conversation turned to the subject of: what bones have you broken? I have never broken any bones, despite having played lacrosse and rugby, because, in case you were unaware of this, I am #@%&!*@ indestructible. No, actually, I attribute this merely to good luck and the fact that I tend to excuse myself and go read a book whenever someone you’re hanging out with suggests something like, “Hey guys, let’s all jump out of this tree onto these rocks and see who can make the loudest noise,” which, if you’re male, happens about every three days. Anyway, after 45 straight minutes of broken bone stories, I started feeling kinda bored and excluded from the conversation. I also realized that if you’re heard one broken bone story you’ve heard them all. No, literally, they’re all exactly the same. Here is the monomythical broken bone story: “So I was doing something stupid/innocuous and all of a sudden I heard something snap, and I said, ‘Hey guys, I think I might have broken this,’ and then someone said, ‘Nah, it’s probably just jammed/dislocated. Here, I’ll pull it back into place,’ and they tried to do that and it hurt like hell. They said, ‘Better?,’ and I said, ‘Not Really,’ so they tried again. And again. And again. So then I went to the doctor and the doctor said, ‘It looks like there’s a lot of bruising here that happened after the injury,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, we thought it was just jammed/dislocated and we tried to pull it back into place, and the doctor said, ‘DON’T DO THAT!'” I heard this exact same story about twenty times. I even heard one person tell it about her finger and then tell it again about her other finger. Hey, the fact that it’s about a different finger does not make it a different story. Maybe you have to be part of the broken bone club to understand this, but if someone said to me, “Hey, I think I may have broken a bone,” I would think that my first instinct would not be to say, “Well hey, just let me yank on that for ya.” And if I was the one with the broken bone, I would not say, “Okay, sure,” more like, “You get the #@*% away from me.” What is it that makes all these people think they’re doctors? Did they all stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night? I just don’t get it.