My World is Shaken

And yours will be too after I relate this sad tale. When I was young, I always had a few undeniable truths. Things I could count on and trust to be there, no matter what was going on around me. As examples, I've always known that Joe Dimaggio's 56 game hitting streak will never be broken, I always knew my parents loved me, no matter what I did, and, until today, I always thought Dear Abby dished out sage and well meaning advise to those unfortunate ones who felt like they needed to ask a lady they don't even know, how to handle life's curve balls. And she always seemed to give the right amount of hope and motherly discipline to the writer. Until this morning that is, when I opened up the paper and read this headline, "Classmates hear sour note when schoolgirl toots her horn". Now I will admit the headline hooked me into reading the column, because I thought it was probably some young band student having peer problems at school. Boy was I wrong. Here's the question from the young lady which I will paraphrase to save space. She explained that as she was sitting in class one day, feeling a bit "gassy" and afraid she might emit an unwanted odor at any moment, the teacher said something so funny that the entire classroom erupted in laughter. Well as you can probably guess, more than laughter erupted, and the noise from this uncomfortable social faux paus zeroed the other students in to more laughter and some expected crude remarks. The girl is way past embarrassment and asks Abby how she should have handled such a delicate situation. By the way, she signed off as "fragrant flower" from Kansas. Here is Abby's answer to the red faced Kansan,--- Dear Fragrant Flower, What happened to you has happened to everyone at one time or another. The way it's usually handled is by trying to ignore it, or by pointing to someone else and asking, "Did YOU expel gas?" However, since you were caught dead to rights and there was no escaping it, my advice is to just let the episode blow over.--- Well there you have it, Abby makes a funny by telling the flatulent teen to let it blow over. Now you know why my world has been turned upside down; you can't even trust Dear Abby anymore. Her advice is that when you cut one in class, the thing to do is point at somebody else and act like they did it. That's more like the advice I would have gotten from my 8th grade football coach. Where is Ann Landers when you need her? What's next? Is Heloise gonna tell us what to eat for more effective SBD's (Silent But Deadly's). You never know, but we better get these advice columnists in check or there'll be chaos in our classrooms.