Anatomy of a misunderstanding

Last night, The Boy (who has a cold) was in the kitchen.  I heard him sneeze.  Then I heard him go "Urrrgh. Holy crap."  Then he called out to me asking if there was any more paper towel.

I was like, "I have tissues here..." and The Boy snapped that he'd asked for paper towel, not tissue, and I was like "Jeez, how many plies do you need?"  I figured he must be standing by the fridge cupping a double handful of nose-custard, afraid to move lest it begin to cascade through his fingers.

"Just BRING ME PAPER TOWEL dammit!!!!"

So, as far as I was concerned, The Boy went into the kitchen for something, had an epic sneeze, and was now being weirdly snippy with me when I helpfully offered to bring him tissue.

What had actually happened, though, was this:

The Boy went into the kitchen to wash his hands.  He paused to sneeze into his sleeve, and it was a forceful enough sneeze that it motivated him to exclaim out loud, but the snot factor was negligible.  He then finished washing his hands, realized there was nothing to dry them on, and couldn't figure out why I was acting all skeeved out and offering him Kleenexes that would only have coated his wet hands in lint.

The Boy is next to me right now, watching me type this.  He says the perfect ending to that anecdote would be if he'd come in and wiped his wet hands on my face.  I think the perfect ending would be for him to have come into the room and done a spontaneous striptease for me...but then again his stripteases are my answer to everything...

...Whether he feels like it or not.

 The actual end of the story, of course, is that we each got mildly pissy with the other person for acting weird, then realized our mistake and laughed a lot and watched some 30 Rock on DVD.