We changed Insurance providers here at Purgatory, Inc. This means I just attended a fifteen minute meeting about the wonders of our new HMO.

I spent the first ten minutes of the meeting noticing how the shirt I am wearing today attracts lint like some kind of magnet. I'm like the Amazing Linto, covered in every conceivable subphylum of linty goodness. My superpowers include the ability to empty dryer lint screens at a distance of five feet. I know that's not really far, but it's still marginally impressive, since you puny mortals have to get in there and rummage around with your bare hands.

Then I remembered having seen, years ago, on the TV program Real People (which is truly best forgotten), a story about a woman who made sculptures out of the lint from her dryer (like this one). Slowly I began to concoct an elaborate hallucination in which a giant dryer lint Mary and Jesus sculpture sprang fully formed from my shirt and began terrorizing the local populace, until some braniac scientist solved everything with an immense leaf blower.

But I digress.

The best part of the highly informative meeting (besides free distribution of the type of ice cream sandwiches that come about 800 to a box for ten dollars) was the insurance woman telling us that our Emergency Room visits would now be fifty dollars. "But I want to remind you," she said. "Fifty dollars may seem like a lot of money, but you should still go to the emergency room if you need to."

I could just imagine cutting off my leg in a highly improbable circular saw accident and waffling over whether the injury was really worthy of the fifty dollar price tag. I've always been one who liked to economize, so I might just cut off something else just to really make sure I got my money's worth. Or wait around until it seemed like I had the flu, just to kill two birds with one stone.