Such was the progress of my giant serrated knife as I tried to saw through a particularly stale bagel a couple of weeks ago. I like to maintain my steady diet of bagels to help keep up the illusion that I’m Jewish for the teeming masses who would be so disillusioned to learn that I’m nothing of the sort, despite looking like a Rabbinical school dropout. Sometimes this necessitates a middle-of-the-night excursion to my local 24-hour bagel emporium (run, appropriately enough, by Hindus) to snatch up whatever they still have in stock before the 6:00 am batch starts to roll hot off the presses. And if all they have are day-old leftovers, well, at least it beats matzo balls and gefilte fish.

I knew I’d made a tragic mistake when, two or three hard-earned strokes through the bagel, I started cutting something that wasn’t quite so doughy. I withdrew the knife from my finger, shortly before hitting bone, but long after doing what would have been only superficial damage. And then the blood came.

It’s been awhile since I wounded myself badly enough to have one of those cuts that just won’t stop gushing. Water, hot or cold, and applied pressure did nothing. Indeed, days later, I would continue to tear the wound open all over again if I looked at it wrong. As I gazed at the fresh, deep cut, I had one of those “stitch or no-stitch” moments before deciding to go with “no-stitch” and, more importantly “no-three-in-the-morning-emergency-room-wait.” I would just deal with it myself.

Dealing with it myself involved the application of ancient leftover Band-Aids that dated back to the genesis of self-adhesive technology. You know the ones I’m talking about. The kind that leave a sticky residue that would suggest, to an experienced criminologist, that you had been kidnapped and bound with duct tape for the last three weeks. The kind that will stay with you through your next dozen showers, despite your best efforts to remove all traces of it with soap and water and a belt sander.

After going through a few of those tar-like bandages, I finally concocted something more suitable with a paper towel and scotch tape. It was so large, however, that typing at my keyboard proved impractical (and painful), and therefore gave me a valid excuse to slack off from both work and blogging. Miraculously, my video gaming was not adversely affected. Funny that.

Unfortunately, time heals all wounds. And now that my finger has safely grown back into one whole piece, I have to get back into the swing of things. Plans are in motion for the next time I need a break though. Call it a premonition, but I think I might be accidentally crushing my thumb in a car door sometime in the future when I need a breather.