Here’s an excerpt from today’s session.

My coach: So, how are you doing?

Me: Not so good. I’m feeling really bad physically.

My coach: What’s up?

Me: Well, I keep thinking that maybe I don’t actually need to keep taking Ibuprofen for my arthritis. So I keep stopping, and then I’m fine for a few days, and then I start to hurt again.

My coach: Why don’t you want to take your medicine?

Me: Because for some reason, I just think that I should not take medicine. Also, I just want this to BE BETTER, DAMMIT!

My coach: Well, isn’t it better when you take your Ibuprofen?

Me: (blows a giant raspberry into the phone)

I just saw this over at my friend, Melanie’s, blog, and so now I’m totally copying her so that I have at least one thing to post this week.

“As a comment on my blog, leave one memory that you and I have had together. It doesn’t matter if you know me a little or a lot, are an in-person or an online friend, just write anything you remember!

Nothing like reminiscing……right?

Next (if you choose to), re-post these instructions on your blog and see how many people leave a memory about you.

It’s actually pretty funny to see the responses. If you leave a memory about me, I’ll assume you’re playing the game and I’ll come to your blog and leave one about you. “

In a few months I will turn 36, and I have realized that it is time for me to make some important decisions in my life.

Namely, I have decided to change my political affiliation to Any Party That Does Not Hold Primary Elections In The Middle Of The Summer. Because if I have to answer the phone and listen to one more awkward and uncomfortable pre-recorded message asking me for my vote, on top of the Unidentified Yet Extremely Painful Ear Inflammation, as well as the fact that someone (I’m looking at you, Pip!) barfed all over my left Birkenstock last night, then I really don’t think I can be held accountable for my actions.

So please, Gwinnett County Republican Party members, STOP! FUCKING! CALLING! ME!

Because apparently you haven’t yet gotten the memo on this, but I don’t actually base my voting decisions on A Candidate’s Ability To Annoy The Shit Out Of Me Before They’ve Even Been Elected To Office.

But you can rest assured that if I did, you would all be winners.

These days when I’m not on Facebook, I’m over on Ravelry.com, “a knit and crochet community”, seeing as how knitting is my new obsession dearest love.

The other day as I was perusing the message boards I came upon a thread asking the intriguing question, “Has anyone knit the Clapotis?”

Naturally every time I saw this, the only thing I could think was, “That sounds like an extremely painful STD.”

Which was fine to think, but then an important gateway guarding the flow of action between my brain and my fingers broke down, and I actually wrote that on the message board.

(Important Side Note: For which I totally blame the Prednisone. Or actually, the fact that I’m slowly getting off of it. And my system is punishing me for taking away its PRE-SSSHHHUUUSSS!!, because without it I am Cranky McBitchyPants, but as soon as I take my ever-decreasing dose I am In Love With The Entire World. Well, except for the part that projectile-vomits all over the hallway and then wants to sit in my lap. That part’s a little hard to take no matter what I’m on.)

And let me tell you something. Apparently, The Clapotis? Is no laughing matter. Because except for explaining exactly what a Clapotis is (”a wide scarf/small shawl knitted on the bias with columns of dropped stitches that make waves on the purl side of the fabric”, in case you were wondering), no one has written anything else on this thread. And not only that-I’ve managed to shut down communication on the entire board.

Apparently I need to be a little more careful the next time I Use My Powers.

A little while ago my husband and I played host to an out-of-town friend of ours. He had a layover in Atlanta, so we picked him up from the airport and hung out together for a few hours.

This friend has recently come out, and so we spent a lot of time talking about the issues he is facing, the effect all of this is having on his relationships, and how he appreciates having friends like us who are willing to talk about this with him.

After we’d hit all the relevant historical sites (read: IKEA) we were trying to decide where to go next.

“How about the Botanical Gardens?” suggested my husband.

“Ooh, great!” I agreed.

“Um, why are we going to a garden again,” asked our friend.

“Because we like to look at flowers,” I replied.

“Oh, geez!,” our friend retorted. “You guys are gay!”

Peace, love, and understanding, man. That’s what we are all about here.

So the other night we received a phone call from our next door neighbor at almost 10:00 at night.

“Do you have any idea why the police are walking around our neighborhood with dogs?” she asked.

We did not know, as a matter of fact, having been blissfully unaware of the presence of law enforcement on our quiet, weekday evening. But as it happens, we do know someone who could probably find out for us.

So we left our friend a voice mail asking, “Um, say, just hypothetically speaking, there were a bunch of police walking around our neighborhood at night with dogs. What might that be about?”

We heard back from our friend today. They haven’t yet found out the details of this specific incident, but they did pass on one little nugget of law enforcement wisdom:

“If the dogs come out, then someone’s getting bitten.”

Lovely.

So this week I started piano lessons again for the first time in 4 years. I was a little (or maybe a LOT) anxious, because my last attempt at piano lessons really didn’t go that well.

So I met my new teacher, stumbled through the lesson, and then afterwards-INTENSELY relieved to have made it through all the sucking-we exchanged contact information.

“If you ever need to get in touch with me, I have a cell phone number that only my students have,” he told me as I was writing my check.

“Ooh, like the Bat Phone!” I exclaimed.

“Exactly”, he said, smiling, and so already he was miles ahead of my previous teacher.

Then he handed me his card, and as I looked at it I thought, “Yep, I think this is gonna work out just fine.”

Lately I’ve been thinking about taking piano lessons again. I played for a long time earlier in my life, from about the age of 5 until my senior year in college, about 14 years ago.

I got this same urge a few years back, and so I started looking around for a teacher. I asked my aunt, who is a professor of music at a college in a neighboring state, for a recommendation and she gave me the name of a good teacher here in Atlanta.

I was a pretty talented pianist back in my day, but when I started taking lessons with my new teacher I realized that I was not even in the same universe as her league. She is very, very good.

I gave the situation the old college try, but it was very hard because I was very intimidated. So one day, as is my wont, I tried to lighten the atmosphere with a little humor.

We were working on a movement of Bach’s French Suite V and she was explaining to me how to interpret some of the ornamentation (like trills) according to the rules of the Baroque period. So, me being me, I responded by saying, “Yeah, and doesn’t it make you wonder just who got to make those rules up, anyway?”

But no, if her blank face and stunned silence were any indication, never in life had it occurred to her to question the Sacred Scriptures Of Musical Interpretation. And furthermore, her horrified visage reproached me, the fact that you would even make such a flippant remark about something so precious and so holy just made kittens DIE!

She’s not my teacher anymore

That is really unfortunate, because “they” are the people involved in treating my C DIF. Not my doctor-him, I love. But because this illness is becoming more and more of a problem, and because the medicine required for its treatment is apparently handcrafted by tiny elves who live in remote workshops in a distant land and spend all their days grinding down rare nuggets of 24-caret gold into a fine powder, carefully placing the powder into fragile, jewel-encrusted capsules, and then glazing the capsules with the wings of the silver faeries who reside in the blossoms of a flower that only blooms at the stroke of midnight on the top of the tallest mountain when the light of the moon falls gracefully across its petals, causing each individual pill to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 850 frajillion dollars, my doctor suggested that I allow Science to step in and lend a hand.

So for the next ten days I’ll be filling out excessively detailed reports documenting every, minute bodily occurrence (as in, “Lost 5 eyelashes on upper left side at 10:39 am Saturday morning in freak gift wrapping accident”), and in exchange for all this scintillating personal data, Science is covering the cost of my treatment.

But as grateful as I am for the medicine, I must admit that I have really not been all that impressed by Science.

For example, on Wednesday I arrived at Science’s office, where I was told that I would have to complete a number of tests, undergo a short physical, and provide data on the history of my illness. Part of this data involved the taking of my vitals, which Science knew in advance that it was going to have to do. But apparently neither Science, nor anyone else in Science’s office, possessed a thermometer. So Science was forced to send its nurse (who incidentally, is also Science’s real-life daughter), to the drug store to purchase one.

Once Science was finally in possession of the necessary medical instrument, it tried valiantly to affix a protective plastic cover over the end of the thermometer before placing it in my mouth. But no matter what it tried to do, it wouldn’t fit. So Science was forced to call on the aid of her daughter, who took one look at the situation and said, “Mom, you have to take the cover of the thermometer off first, before you put the plastic part on.”

I very nearly gave up on Science at this point, but unfortunately I was too sick and tired to be able to make my escape.

Science also needed to collect some of my blood, so next we paid a visit on Robert, the guy who collects all the blood. It did not go well.

Science then informed me that I would have to return in three hours, once I’d taken my first dose of the medicine, in order for Robert to collect even more blood.

I then turned to Science, looked her dead in the eye, and said, “This medicine had Better. Fucking. Work.” And Science had no idea what to say to that, because Science is clearly used to spending all of its time with numbers, graphs, and various bodily fluids, rather than desperate, half-crazed women who have been sick for the past three months and might, at any minute, decide to rip your face right off your head and make you eat it just so they can find a little relief.

But I F-I-N-A-L-L-Y got my medicine. And the second trip to Robert was a little easier. And I have been faithfully filling out my worksheets (”At 5:04 am, right buttock began twitching uncontrollably in time to the song, “Ice, Ice, Baby”).

And even though Science did give me a little check to cover my traveling expenses, right now?

My feeling is pretty much that Science can just go ahead and suck it.

So as I mentioned yesterday, I finally escaped Excessively Loud Jolly Man and made it in to see my doctor. He, I, his medical assistant, we were all pretty sure that yep, I still/once again have C DIF, and that it’s time to move up to the seriously bad-ass medicine for this round of treatment.

Only he wouldn’t give me a prescription for said medicine until he got back the results of my stool sample. Which was fine, except that they wouldn’t take my sack of poo! They told me I had to drive it over to the hospital and find someone over there to take it.

So I did, even though it was extremely odd to basically be chauffeuring my poo all around the greater Atlanta area.

I parked, and for the sake of this story, let’s say that my parking lot was in northern Georgia. And then I had to walk all the way over to the front desk which, metaphorically speaking, was all the way over in southern South Carolina. There I once again had the privilege of informing a complete stranger that, Hi, I’m carrying around a sack full of my own poo, looking for someone who will pretty pretty please take it off of my hands.

At which point the receptionist looked at me, looked at my bag, and said, “Well okay, but first you’re gonna have to go and take it to get registered.”

Me: (blinking)

Me: (as in, I have to register it so that it can go off to an educational summer camp and then get into a really good school with all the other stool samples?)

So I trudged on over to, say, central South Carolina and explained my situation to yet another random stranger in hopes that maybe she would finally give my poo a loving home.

But no, they wouldn’t take it in there, so they called the courtesy (golf) car(t) to come and take me back over to northern Georgia, which is where I started out in the first place.

Finally, almost an hour later, I found the correct lab where I was met at the reception desk with…stunned outrage and indignant disbelief that, of all things, I brought a stool sample! To a lab! A stool sample on which I had the audacity to expect them to perform laboratory tests, if you can even believe the nerve of me.

I had well and truly had it by this time, and was one dirty look away from responding, “Look, lady-I wasn’t the one who decided to go into a job where you have to deal with other people’s poo on a daily basis. It’s not my fault.”

So she was a real bitch, which is really not what you need after suffering with hostile alien bacteria for over 2 months, but in the end she took my stuff, and they did the test, and it came back positive, which meant I could finally start treatment.

I’ll save that story for tomorrow, because it I don’t really have the energy right now to write about how I almost had to rip someone’s face right off and make them eat it. That’s a story for another day.