25 October 2001

My new cough suppressants are so cool. They look like they belong in a Lego set. They're these tiny, clear, hard yellow spheres. Of course, I could die a sudden death if I chewed on one of them. But they're little, easy to swallow, very hard to chew on, so that's okay.

I am bemused, though. The pharmacist wanted to give me a special verbal warning about these things. What she had to tell me is that they might make me dizzy. I had to read the packet to find out the sudden death if chewed thing. Which I would think would be rather more important.

People seem to be split between, "Oh, hey, sorry to hear that; happens, though" and "You what? You're not supposed to be able to do that!" My mom thinks I should get my own way for the next 4-6 weeks. I think that's a bit excessive. Mom is feeling guilty. I don't think she's decided yet between feeling guilty for not telling me to go to the doctor on Saturday or just some generic guilt because it's her genes that produce this effect. I think this is just part of being a Mommy: if you haven't Made It Better, it's somehow Your Fault.

I can understand this attitude completely.

Scott's new (temporary) roommate in his company apartment is evidently too stupid to use call-waiting. So I didn't get to talk to him last night. This is kind of like when the book got rejected a bit ago: I think people who care about me would want to know, and I like hearing well-wishes when bad things happen, but calling someone up to tell them you've broken small bits of you, well, it just seems weird. And e-mail doesn't make it any better to just say, "Hi, I'm broken." It's still weird.

Timprov and I decided that more effort ought to go into investigating hot cocoa as a gateway drug. What percentage of "hard" drug users first tried hot cocoa? Probably pretty high. Darn that hot cocoa. So then I went away to talk to my grandma on the phone, and when I came back, Timprov was getting ready to go to sleep. He had changed his mind. "Milk is the gateway drug," he said. "Or else why would they put cows on the boxes?" It took me a minute. But I groaned.

Ah well. I feel a bit boring; I've been reading and working, but also hurting and whining. (Hey, you know what? Your body doesn't like to have bits of it broken. It takes it rather poorly.) And while I think the scenes I've written on the Not The Moose Book are interesting, "Hey, I wrote the one where Avery talks to the renegade louhi in the coffeehouse" is just not that big a news for anyone else. Mark has been attending lots of seminars lately, so if you want to know about getting an academic job in computer science, he's your man at the moment. But other than that, we're pretty boring around here. Being sick for this long makes my social life kind of stink: I keep waiting to get well before I ask people to do specific cool things. And then I keep not getting well. Argh. I keep trying not to be cranky about everything. But it gets at me. I'm not bored with what I'm doing, but...I do wish I was feeling good enough to get out and see people a bit more, even if they were just the people who serve coffee or sell stamps.

We are currently out of cheese, but I believe we still have some nice cheese curds to go with this whine.