Headlice Fading

Ginger Baker, my long-loving wife, had the brilliant idea of donating our time to charity. I was happy to do it—you know me, anything for a cause of some sort—until I learned donating time was a lot harder than donating money. Then I wanted to give the money. But Ginger promised me it would be worth the time. I'm still waiting for that proof to show up.

We're donating our time to the children, since Ginger believes firmly that the children are our future. I partially agree. I think the adults they grow up into will be our future, but kids will always be leeches taking all our money and time and eating all our food without any compensation. Plus, what about nanotechnology? The nano-things could be our real future, and I bet you dollars to donuts they're not happy about all this wasted time messing around with children.

That said, I had already agreed to volunteer at the schools and couldn't get out of it by this point. Ginger and I offered our help with Health Awareness Day or some such thing. Ginger, being a real estate broker, gave an inspiring lecture about buying property in economically depressed areas, and then sitting on them until the zoning changed to really clean up. Turns out this has nothing to do with health. I wanted to teach the kids about the value of being under-tall, but was directed instead to assist in checking the kids for health problems.

I was assigned to examine the male children for back problems, specifically, a condition called scoliosis. No, I thought it was a new wave British pop band, too, but apparently it's some sort of back condition that comes from forcing kids to sit in cheap rigid chairs for hours at a time. I don't know about you, but looking at boys naked from the waist up too closely all day isn't the kind of charity I had in mind. It's nice to know such jobs exist, though, if you're someone who's been recently turned away from the priesthood. Still, for me, it was dullsville city. And I didn't want to ask to be transferred to the girls' division either. Partly because I'm not a pedophile, but mostly because I would likely strangle the first child I saw with one of those ass crack tattoos that all the young people seem to be ruining their bodies with.

When I did request a transfer, those jokers in the Health Awareness Day Assignment Committee really showed their spots. I was assigned to the Headlice Check—me, Rok Finger! I tried to remind them I'm practically a celebrity (college kids know my name, I promise you that), but there's no special treatment for anyone at Martin Van Buren Elementary, I guess. Or so they say in the school song, which I believe is sung to the tune of Chumbawamba's "Tubthumper." But I bet if Ralph Waite showed up and asked for a job, he wouldn't be fingering the scalps of greasy little kids looking for bugs.

I tried to speed up the process, streamline it, the same thing I do here at the commune when I hand in somebody else's old columns to run as my own. But the school didn't appreciate my new policy, which was to have the kids who think they have lice to wear red hats, while those who didn't think they had lice wore blue hats. I can tell you this, though, in my short amount of time I learned that kids have no idea whether they have lice or not. Virtually every one of them was wrong. It didn't help that we only had two blue hats and three red hats, and had to pass them around frequently.

Still, volunteering wasn't quite as unpleasant as I believed it would be. I did get a free lunch out of the ordeal (pizza square, green beans, tater tots, corn bread, and my choice of milk). And more than that, I got the feeling of being a positive influence in my community. A tax-deductible expenditure of my work hours in my community.

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