Watch for Me on the Next Episode of House, M.D.

One of my greatest pleasures/neuroses in life is cleaning out my ears with Q-Tips after showering each morning.

Not only do I find this practice immensely satisfying, but if I don't clean both ears simultaneously, I'll feel "off" all day long and something bad might happen.

I did hear that you should never stick anything smaller than an elbow inside your ear, but I figured this didn't really apply to me and the Q-Tips. Because while I do sometimes really go to town in there, I never, uh . . . stick it very far in.

Well, I went to the ear, nose, and throat specialist today on account of my chronic vertigo, and he extracted a ball of wax and cotton the size of a golf ball (give or take) from my left ear.

In fact, not two seconds after poking around with a flashlight, the good doctor pronounced, "You're a big fan of the Q-Tip, I see . . ."

The telltale signs, of course, were the pieces of cotton lodged deep inside my ear canal, as well as - and this is true - the Q-tip shaped imprints on the ear wax that I had managed to shove clear up into my head. You can't pull anything over on these guys.

The ball of wax and cotton had been in there for so long, that it was really more of a space rock. And I'll tell you something else: it hurt like a motherf$cker on the way out. So much so that, if you didn't have a gigantic ball of wax and cotton in your ear, you could probably hear me swearing all the way out in the waiting room.

While the doctor was out in the hall, looking for, I can only assume, an appropriately sized fish hook/vacuum cleaner attachment to use for the cleaning process, I asked his medical resident sidekick, "What the hell is a Q-Tip for, if not poking around inside of one's eustachian tubes?"

("concealer application and small craft projects")

It's going to be mighty hard for me to give up the old Q-Tip habit, but I'm pleased to announce that my head feels ten pounds lighter already.

Well, as my grandmother always said, "Live and learn, and you still die stupid."

(What she really should have told me was not to stick a goddamn Q-Tip in my ear.)