You can’t blame me for being a little paranoid. Sometimes I feel like I was born to lose. It seems like everything I try to do goes wrong. As if all the forces of nature conspired against me to make sure life’s no bowl of cherries. Other women sit around all day eating bon-bons and sipping Tang. But life, for me, could never be so easy. Life for me is one big bitch fight.

Funny how my tooth whitening toothpaste, zit cream, and tube of ringworm ointment all come in four inch long white tubes with indecipherably small writing. Easy to see how I could end up with something similar to Fast Actin’ Tinactin on my toothbrush at six o’clock in the morning when I’m scurrying around to get to the beauty shop on time. Of course, nothing’s really fast enough when you’ve got ringworm on your thigh--right where your mini-skirt hits, so that if you have to do the wave at a baseball game or something, your dress hikes up and everybody sees your Band-Aid and concludes that maybe they wouldn’t want to go thigh-to-thigh with you anytime soon.

There’s a stigma attached to having a Band-Aid on your upper thigh, especially if you’re over nine years old in which case you could have been bitten by a vicious dog. I caught my own personal ringworm infestation from an innocent-looking cat, a cat that I took pity on, allowing it to rest its fungus covered chin on my naked skin. It comes as a kind of karmic spanking on the heels of my recent anti-cat-psychiatry column. Any cat with ringworm has every right to low self-esteem but that doesn’t mean I’m footing the bill for his aroma therapy.

As for the other tubes—I’ve discovered that toothpaste on a zit doesn’t do flip and even less to cure something as unyielding as ringworm. In the early morning confusion, it’s easy to forget to use deodorant and wind up quadruply afflicted—with zits, b.o., ringworm and fungicidal breath all at once, like some terminally unattractive pawn in the cosmic chess game.

You can’t help but feel picked-on. To toss and turn from dusk ‘til dawn, wondering "Why me?" You’d like to punch destiny in the kisser. Give fate a hot foot. Do you dare to give voice to the ultimate question? The question that can get you struck by lightening? The question that surely must have crossed Job’s mind and look where it got him?

The question? WHY AM I THE ONE WITH RINGWORMS, instead of someone like Tipper Gore? We’re both frisky blondes with perky names. We both gave birth to broods of fresh-faced young ‘uns. We both have long-winded husbands. We both have to look fresh as a daisy at a moment’s notice.

So, how come I’m the stinkweed and she’s smelling like a rose? Why does she get a reliable vehicle and I’m driving an ’85 Suburban? Why does she get the handsome bodyguards and if some guy tries to steal my Kate Spade-lookalike from Matamoros—well, he just better know kickboxing.

She’s got everything a girl could want. Twenty-four hour a day tv coverage and access to more good-looking convention delegates than you can shake a stick at. Who cares if Al’s a little stiff? It’s better than being a dim-witted goober, as dumb as a shoe, like some woman’s presidential candidate-husband.

At least all I got from the stray cat was ringworms. I’ve gotten worse from men.