Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

I will begin with a damning photograph. Here is the inside of my dishwasher when I opened it up expecting to see a sparkling load of clean dishware: Next, I will show you a photograph of the detergent employed in the achievement of the above fiasco. Please glance to the right.  Of course, I immediately snapped into action and wrote a scathing review on Drugstore.com. I accused Arm&Hammer of shilling a substandard chunk of a product that clots like an oxygen-starved deep vein embolism on the door of my dishwasher. I stated with lavish fervor that all my still-not-clean dishes were now coated with a thin film of calcified white foam, reminiscent of nuclear fallout. I wrote something about how the only thing accomplished was turning my dishwasher into a bacteria pleasure palace. Bam. I closed up my computer and threw out the rest of the Crystal Burst. Several weeks later, I received a spam-style email from drugstore.com notifying me that the Crystal Burst was ...

Was it simply the long hairy arm of coincidence? On the exact same day I learned I do not walk properly, I found out I can't brush my teeth right either. Last December, the 14th if you must know, I was sitting in an oversized comfortable chair reading the unabridged Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and underlining majestic clumps of words like " amiably drunk ," " vivid vermeil " and " coltish subteens ." I twisted upon a plush velvet cushion, reached for a glass of pomegranate juice and heard a terrible grinding noise in my hip that hurt like a white-hot bitch.  I hobbled around for months. Whenever anyone asked, I had to admit I had been incapacitated by an incident involving soft upholstery. Every day I would wake up in incredulous denial. Occasionally I tried to go running. That was a medically poor decision. In March, I finally doddered to a doctor and discovered my left hip joint is a pocked and battered warzone. The lounge chair had little to do...