Tuesday, September 30, 2003

I Am Ready For Your Care Packages

My Recurring Tuberculosis (tm) has recurred, and with a vengeance. My body, normally sheltered from the elements, now burns with fever. My temperature, should you be interested, hovers around 97 degrees. Why does it always do this? Have I already died? Am I a chicken with its head left on?

I spent most of the day hopped up on Dayquil. Oddly, it made me infinitely more productive at work. Is this what it was like for the people I worked with at the factory that one summer, the ones who did speed in order to work faster?

Oh my G*d, I'm a tubercular drug addict.

Monday, September 29, 2003

My Unmarked Body
An essay about random happenings

Have you ever had the sort of day where you just wake up looking for things to be mad about? Where you ride the bus at some god-awful early hour, thinking, "If Ginny said this crazy impossible thing about me, then I will say these crazy impossible things to her, make her cry, and really teach her a lesson about being mean." I'm having one of those days.

Which is strange, since I just got back from a relatively glorious vacation in Whistler, BC. I spent four days there with various and sundry relatives, basking in (ok, near) the sunshine and enjoying all sorts of strange activities. The whole thing was relaxing and fun and I really didn't think too much about work or responsibility. Or people being mean.

I did go horseback riding (the names of the horses that my brother and I rode: Rod and Tod), and I DID have a gigantic asthma attack, complete with nonstop sneezing and eyes so watery that I could have been bawling. And Rod DID notice that I was terrified (and sneezy and watery) as we descended the very steep rocky path down a very high mountain, so he DID take every opportunity to amble over to the very edge of the cliff (ostensibly to munch on some forlorn leaves, clinging with all their might to a sad little Charlie-Brown-Christmas tree perched on the side of the path) just to show me who was really in charge.

And I did go fly-fishing, which was both more fun and more boring than I thought it would be. But just standing in the middle of a cold mountain stream, in the middle of the mountains, watching as hundreds and hundreds of dark-red salmon swam past me, or writhed around me in their peculiar mating dance, with a fly rod in my hand and hopefully no fish on the hook, was beautiful enough to make it all worth my while. (For the record, two respectable rainbow trout, one eager minnow, and one impossibly stupid whitefish made their way onto my hook. All of them were released, but the stupid whitefish probably didn't survive. Oh well.)

And I did go hiking, and I DID see a mean-looking chipmunk. And I shopped and I ate and I drank and I swam and I slept. So, all of those good things.

But I didn't relish the thought of coming back to work. And it turns out that I was right in my hesitation. It turns out that the reason I don't have a boyfriend was the burning topic of discussion on the days that I was gone. One smart person, himself gay and so he would know, had this to say:

"And what is with a gay man not already having a tattoo at his age? I'll tell ya, these midwestern gays are alot different than the coast gays. He is very sheltered. A tattoo would change his entire persona, especially at the bar where its like eating time at the Lions cage, but instead of the biggest getting all the meat, the best looking and most fit and musculine with a hint of a wild side are the ones who get fed the most. I'm afraid our little lion will continue to be hungry for a long time to come unless he learns to fend for himself and gets in tthe thick of things."

Oh how I long to be musculine.

Sunday, September 21, 2003

Work Hard, Play ... not at all

OK, not really. I know you've all been highly concerned about my strangely uncharacteristic workaholic ways lately. Well, concern yourselves no longer! I'm taking off on Thursday to spend four days with my brother at Whistler in the Canadian Rockies. So far, the plan is to hike, ride horses and go fly-fishing.

Yes, I'm lazy, and yes, I'm allergic to animals (including, as I found out in the front row of the Moscow Circus, horses), and YES, I don't eat fish. But it should be fun anyway. As long as I don't get mauled by a chipmunk. It is, you know, the season for it.

Thursday, September 18, 2003

There's Clearly Not Enough Mouthwash In My Diet

A couple of days ago, I took an early bus (we're talking the 5:45 bus instead of the 6:15 bus) to work. You'd think it would have been kind of quiet and subdued. Well, think again. There was a man on the bus who insisted on talking to me FOR THE ENTIRE RIDE.

The interesting part of this story is that every once in a while ... say, once every five minutes or so ... the man would stop talking to take a big old drink of Listerine. The yellow kind. Mm hmm. That's right. The man was drinking forking Listerine. "Oh, this stuff can't hurt you, and it's 30% alcohol!" he would say after he took a pull, while the sani-fresh scent wafted through the back of the bus.

I no longer go to work that early.

Sunday, September 07, 2003

My Very True Adventures with a Honeybee

I am not afraid of bees. Quite to the contrary, I happen to like bees very much. Never having been stung, I kind of think that bees and I have worked out a good relationship. We respect each other. I plant flowers for them (they especially love the greyish-purple flowers of rosemary), and in turn they let me consume gallons of their handiwork (which relieves them of having exorbitant storage costs, I figure). But really, that's where I thought the relationship ended. Apparently not.

This morning, as I was driving to yoga, I noticed a bee on the windshield of my car. I was feeling kind of bad for said bee because it's the end of the summer and she's probably pretty tuckered out by now. Plus, it was a cold and rather grey morning, which can't be good for a bee's mood. So anyway, we were driving along, the bee and I, and we were talking about nothing in particular, when the bee started doing a little dance. You remember, the kind of dance that you've seen in 9th grade biology films. The kind where the bee is trying to communicate the exact directions to some particularly interesting locale.

Well, I don't speak bee. I couldn't figure out if the bee thought that I was some gigantic bee taxi and so she was giving me directions to her destination, or if the bee was some sort of apian Lassie, trying to lead me to the well where Timmy was stuck. Whatever the case may be, the whole affair ended in disappointment. The bee gave up and flew away, more than a little bothered by my inability to help. I drove on, wondering if I had wasted her time as some disaster (bear at the hive?) worsened.

I guess we'll never know.