Near Misses

17 October 2001

The good news: Ceej is out of the hospital and on good drugs that make him feel muuuch better. His throat is no longer swollen shut, which really would improve anyone's week. It improves my week that his throat is no longer swollen shut. So. We croaked and whispered at each other for awhile yesterday before we both ran out of gas and had to hang up.

The further good news: my cold has progressed to the point where I feel it's reasonable to take a cough suppressant. The hope is that this will allow me to stop feeling as though I've spent all day doing crunches. The wrong kind of crunches at that, the kind that make you sore without actually making anything stronger. I keep thinking I've been doing nothing this week, physically speaking, but if you witness the full-body cough, that's just not true. (The full-body cough scares Timprov. Heh. I'm an amateur. He should see my mom cough. She can break ribs. Sometimes even her own. And my dad gets flu much better than I, as he claimed on e-mail last night. I guess I just got the inferior genes in both cases.)

The inevitable bad news after having read the above: I'm still sick. Still feeling nasty. Still migrating from the couch to the bed and occasionally to the computer chair. I worked on the Not The Moose Book more yesterday in hopes that it would make me feel better. It did, but not physically. Ah well. Symbols are important sometimes.

Yesterday afternoon, a well-meaning loved one who shall remain unnamed wrote to me and asked me if my first and second books weren't being published yet. And I cried. A word to the wise: you may think that "yet" is an encouraging word. They haven't been published yet, but they will be someday. But that's only with a positive: "Are your books being published yet?" With a negative, it becomes "Come on! What are you waiting for? Doesn't anybody want them? Aren't they any good?" Which I could usually deal with, but see the above paragraph: I'm sick.

I've got George Carlin in my head now, on the subject of near misses: "Oh, look, they neahly missed." Meaning they banged right into each other. I've had a lot of people sending me near misses lately. I've been trying to keep it to near hits, myself. Yesterday afternoon, my fevered brain decided that a good thing to do would be to write letters to everybody who's made me cry in a bad way lately, ranging from people I'm close with to symbolic heads of governments, companies, and organizations. Didn't send a one of them, of course; had no feeling that anybody involved would really listen, and they would have done more harm than good, to myself and to other people. So, you know. They can keep nearly missing, and I'm going to keep trying to nearly hit, trying to think in the long term.

In the long term, I don't cough so much. I like it better there anyway.

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