that thing you do.

"There are going to be times," my mother has said, "that you will just have to smile and nod. You will feel your head shaking up and down, and you will ignore the rattling that the action causes. You will be shaking to loosen the blood clot intent on stroking out your common sense. You will feel an ounce of brain juice make the snotty transition to spinal fluid: useful on physical impact, but dripping with knowledge lost. Your heart may ache, and your skin could fall clammy. There will be a piercing ringing sound within the room, rendering you deaf but not affecting your offender. The tiniest of hairs will be righted, straining away from your skin as if you have licked each finger for insertion into ten different light sockets. Your bowels will clench. And just as you feel a scream burp up from your lungs and enter your throat, you will inhale the sticky, musty air that hovered about your moistened lip seconds before. As you exhale that same air minus its healing eight protons and eight electrons times something like Avogadro's number, you will feel your lips tighten into a smile, genuine or more likely manufactured, and you will notice that you continue to nod, with or against your better judgment."

I am, of course, paraphrasing.