We are not amused

Day eight. See how much better this is looking? You don't. Well, admittedly, me either - but I haven't wept uncontrollably for two days and this, I assure you, is progress. Weeping and depression are two of the side-effects they don't mention in articles.

Today the Doctor actually issued me a corticosteroid ointment. To tell you the truth, I'm not confident anything will help, but I'm desperate enough to try and desperate enough to beg for anything that might. It's that or spend the next three or four weeks wearing high necklines and scarves wound around my neck. It's August, for the love of god. August.

Today was the new boyfriend's birthday. I'd rallied a little and planned to cover up suitably (I am not contagious) and take him out to dinner. However, it seems he is a little Howard Hughesish about rashes and wasn't about to take the doctor's word that he wasn't in danger. I believe that was sufficient reason to push him into the ex-new boyfriend category in my mind. Instead, I took Weedy and her husband out because, frankly, by this afternoon, if I had to stare at the walls of my apartment or go without human company a minute longer I'd have gone stark raving mad.

On the up-side, I can start the medication for the bladder infection just as soon as I finish the anti-virals! Party!

And P.S. I have decided that my immune system is not the only thing past its best-before date. The dating pool is, at best, a stagnant pond full of bottom dwellers and slugs. The good part is that I no longer care.

Thank you for allowing me to rant. Stay tuned for the huge spiritual realization that will follow all of this. I'm grinning. Really.

Shingle me tivers!

I get up finally when The Cat gives up on purring and head bonking and bites the top of my head to wake me up. No coffee. Fasting-since-midnight tests upcoming. I drink three glasses of water, shower, scoop the litter box, feed The Cat, make the bed and get dressed without actually being fully conscious. Weedy picks me up at eight a.m.

Blood tests. Routine yearly blood tests that I regularly go for once every five or six years when the doctor suddenly says, "How long has it been since...?" Take a number. Wait. Maintain dull caffeine-deprived stupor. Try not to look at other number-clutching victims. When number is called, proceed to stall four. Sit down, hold out arm and be recognized by staff vampire who knows me from another lifetime and needs to list all common acquaintances of our youth and ask if I've seen them. Stupor is holding perfectly. Lucky I know my own name. Finally, we reach the grand finale and I pee in a jar.

Then we are directed to the third floor by a nice man who clearly doesn't know if that is where you drink barium. By a stroke of luck, we arrive in the right unit. A sign says "Barium enema, Barium swallows, Upper GI" - very warm and homey. I am "Upper GI" and thanking the gods for it when I consider the alternatives. I take a number. I turn to Weedy and say, "It's your fault I can't read a magazine."
"That's right. Germs." she says without any hint of remorse or apology.

Finally they call my name and we go to waiting room three of the morning and I am issued the standard cotton-tie raglets. Everyone has barium to drink but me, I am wearing only large dust cloths in unflattering colors and my sandals and I consider complaining about the service. Then I look at the faces of the people drinking barium and reconsider. A half hour after my appointment time has come and gone, I am ushered into a room with a slab and given my very own cup of barium. I don't think it tastes half bad and swallow as ordered while a machine studies my inner workings.

By noon, Weedy and I make it to food. We inhale eggs, bacon, toast and potatoes and I steal an extra piece of complimentary fudge for her as we leave.

On to the doctor. Who looks at the big nasty sore red patches blooming on my chest, shoulder and back and decides that I have Shingles. He prescribes large dark blue pills and assures me that they should help. Should? Should? I am running horror stories about people with shingles getting addicted to pain killers and being unable to function for six months. Should??? No way. I am not taking "should" for an answer. This virus WILL die and it will damn well do it fast.

I phone to inform the new boyfriend of my pox-ridden condition. And add, cheerfully, in a later email, "Well, at least it isn't an STD!" I know how to charm a man, by god.

Inside my head, however, a small high-pitched voice is whining, "Why meeeee?!"

And of course, you all know the answer to that one, don't you? Why not me?

Country and Western songs

The phone rings at 8:57 a.m. - but only once. It rings again at 10:00 a.m. and this time he doesn't hang up. By then, I assume, he's taken the requisite number of deep breaths and stiffened his resolve so that, after a long and almost entirely happy relationship of two and a half years, he can announce that we have not been very happy and now it's over.

He phoned it in. That's all I can think about. Two and a half years and he phoned it in.

It is, I think, the second time I have ever let him see me angry. Or more accurately, hear me angry. I don't argue or point out that we have one of these every six months and the rest of the time we are overjoyed to see each other.

"I hoped we could be friends, " he says, "but you don't sound friendly, and I guess that's understandable right now...."

Friends. Does a friend dump you on the phone? Doesn't feel very friendly to me. Feels downright sleazy, in fact.

And now, onward and hopefully upward - pushing off on my three unbalanced wheels, I'll just be continuing with the diagram and directions from hell.

Peter Cottontail is dead

It is a typical January day. Steady heavy snowfall has dropped a white cover over the world outside my window, the temperature is heading for minus one Celsius, and the weather sadists predict that it will taper off sometime tomorrow morning, after which the wind will increase to 70K per hour. The temperature will still be a minus.

It is In between Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. April 7th, in case you aren't catching my drift. The time of year I expect to see small purple and yellow flowers emerging from the earth. The season in which I send my winter coat to the dry cleaners and start trying to remember where I put my sandals. When the dead straw covering the ground turns a miraculous green.

No. Apparently not.

And even though I have lived in this provincial outpost of hell for twenty-one years, my poor rigid brain cannot seem to accept the idea that Spring, in the Canadian maritimes, is more of a concept than an event.

I take it personally.

It is on my list of questions for the Supreme Being. It is on my list of Critical Design Flaws. Not to mention the fact that I'd like to inquire as to whether the Supreme Being thinks this is funny or simply dislikes an entire block of the north Atlantic and everyone who sails on her.

This paranoia is, of course, ego-maniacal self-pity of the grandest magnitude, when you consider real natural disasters. I mean tsunamis. I mean earthquakes and Hurricane Katrina. And the unnatural natural disasters spawned by our love of comfort and fossil fuel. I tell myself that, but I continue to sulk.

I sulk and I read "In a Sunburned Country" for the second time. I long to be in Australia - a place where plants and rocks are a strange and beautiful blue-grey. Where it is late summer.
Or in Cuba or Brazil - wearing a red dress to set off my gorgeous sunburn, drinking tequila or rum and gazing at flowers. Hell. I would settle for Vancouver where it's just as grey but the precipitation is not solid and the temperature is...seasonally appropriate.

Here, Spring may not come at all. One day in late May or Early June, it will become summer. It will shock our cold whithered systems into stupidy. It will be humid. Or not. Sometimes summer is also a concept - at least until September, when it becomes glorious, hot and sunny - just at the time I'm thinking I should find my winter coat. July could be lovely...warm and sun-drenched or, then-again, foggy and rain-soaked every single day for the entire month.

Fortunately for me, I have a book and enough cheap red wine to blur my eyesight if that's the only escape. And I can cheer myself with the fact that I haven't been waiting all winter to ride a motorcycle. Now those guys are suffering.

Tickets to anywhere else gratefully accepted. But be patient. Because if the ticket is for outside Canada, thanks to the new US border-crossing regulations, our passport offices are 127,000 passport applications behind - and my passport has expired.