It’s karma, I tell you. Karma.

Last week, I took a walk during lunch and when I got back to my office, there was a honeybee on my shirt. Now, the gardener in me said, “Don’t kill the bee. Take it outside.” But the office worker in me, who lives on the fourth floor of a building with hermetically sealed windows and slow elevators said, “Kill the bee. Kill it now.” So I crushed it quickly and—hopefully—painlessly in a Kleenex. But I suspected that there would be some karmic hell to pay.

So I was working in the garden the other day—it was gloomy and not even bee weather, per se. I mean, when it’s overcast, bees hang out in the hive, drink coffee, and work on their blogs, don’t they? Anyway, I was just minding my own beeswax and plucking a few faded rose petals when all of a sudden, I got pricked in the tender jiggle flab under my arm. You know, that same pale place that you can never properly brown on a chicken wing.

“Sonofabeetch!” I hollered. It’s really quite a satisfying, yet underutilized profanity. I understand now why Grandma Dora used to let it rip frequently—usually as in, “I told that SOB he could go straight to hell.” Go get ‘em, Grandma. No wonder I can conjugate the f-bomb 17 different ways. Grandpa Marvin, on the other hand, used to say, “Sonofabuck,” which isn’t nearly as satisfying, but he was a sailor.

So I looked around to see what had stung me, and there was a fuzzy bumblebee on my shirt—just about where the honeybee had been on me at work. My first thought was, “Karmic retribution.” My second thought was, “Shit. I just squished a bee with my arm fat.”

Now my arm fat has been a problem for a while. I’m kind of petite, actually—minus those 20 extra pounds—but I’ve always had much larger arms than other girls. Their sleeves flapped around their dainty arms like a flag in the breeze. My sleeves burst at the seams as if I were a German Olympic swimmer. But my arm fat was mostly a fashion problem—until now. I’d never killed a critter with it before.

And the sting sure does itch. It’s driving me crazy. Ma Bell—queen of home remedies—told me to put a penny on it, but I only have a debit card. So I Googled “bee sting itch” and found a Slate article where the author intentionally got stung so he could test various medical and home remedies—kind of like Consumer Reports for bee stings. People sure do some crazy things in the name of Internet journalism.

Of the many suggested remedies, I tried the toothpaste—for exactly the reasons the author thought I might: I had some and it was easy. It works, too—with the added bonus that my jiggle fat is now sparkling white. And no tartar.

*This one thanks to Fa, who said, “You got stung? That could be your next post.”