Image courtesy of Free Foto.

1. About a week ago our next door neighbor called and asked if I could stay with one of her sons while she took the other one to swimming lessons. She couldn’t take them both, because her one little guy had pneumonia and wasn’t supposed to leave the house.

I told her that normally I would, but that I was sick too, and had just been diagnosed with fibromyalgia.

“It’s chronic, you, know, and my body’s all messed up, so I’m really not supposed to be around sick people,” I explained.

“What do you mean, ‘chronic’?” my neighbor asked, in what sounded like a panicked voice.

“Well there’s no cure-I just have to manage the symptoms.”

She sounded unduly upset as we hung up the phone, so as I was describing this conversation to my husband I said, “You know, I bet when I said ‘chronic’, she heard ‘fatal’.”

We saw our neighbor and her husband at the party we attended this weekend, and when I would have stood up to greet them they were all, “Oh, no, no, don’t get up. We gotcha.”

My suspicions were confirmed after they moved on to other guests when my husband turned to me and said, “Oh yeah-she thinks you’re dying.”

I really didn’t know how to handle this, but thankfully my husband was more than willing to go over and be The Ambassador Of Clearing The Air And Straightening Things Out, and was able to reassure them that, while things were kind of rough, I was not, in fact, dying.

2. Once that was all cleared up my neighbor and I had a grand old time catching up. We were talking about one thing and the other, and then somehow ended up with her asking me if I wanted to have kids.

I said no, that my husband and I live a pretty quiet life, but it really suits us because we are both nerds.

“Oh, nerds,” my neighbor said, “That always makes me think of someone who is really good with computers. Are you really good with computers?”

“Um, no,” I replied sadly. “I guess then that I’m actually just a dork.”