Outdated Entry of Illness and Frustration
I�ve been sitting in my apartment for two days. I haven�t called in sick and actually been sick for what seems like years. Until now. There are dishes in the sink that don�t belong to me and my roommate keeps telling me that he�ll put them in the dishwasher tomorrow. The dishwasher is full and I should empty it, but my fists are filled with Kleenex. I must hold them against my nose and rub my temple with my free hand or I will pass out and suffocate in my own snot. It is terrible. People have called to check on me but when I answer the phone they can hardly understand me because my voice is gone. I�m croaking. My father didn�t even recognize me when I called to see if my parents had a humidifier.
The only person who has come to the door was a fat girl in a green baseball cap soliciting donations for the local rape crisis center. I should put up a �no solicitations� sign because I can�t say no to these people, but a sign seems unneighborly. The least I can do is decline in person. I answered the door while telling myself that I wasn�t giving anyone any money. I�m broke. I can hardly feed my own dog. I wore a bra with a broken underwire for three weeks. Not one cent to whatever cause. No money. When the fat girl tried to open the screen door, I yelled, �I�m horribly sick! You don�t want to come in here! Talk through the screen!� She passed leaflets to me through a crack in the door and asked for sixty dollars. I said no, so she said any amount was fine, maybe thirty dollars or thirty-five. I was able to fend her off, but the rain forests or the whales or the girl scouts are sure to get me next time.
I wonder what kinds of statistics exist on unemployment and suicide. Daytime television makes me want to eat a shotgun. Divorce Court? Texas Justice? How do people watch this shit? Two consecutive days of daytime television programming and I�m ready to sell my soul for a Mickey D�s work uniform. I have to get out of this godforsaken house, people. I. Can�t. Take. It. Oprah threw a baby shower for a truckload of Army wives today. Gave them all kinds of freebies�strollers, books, pajamas, plane tickets�all while some country music star was singing a song about having children. Eerily, one of the women went into labor, was carted off to the hospital, and gave birth on television. Immediately afterward, a nurse laid the baby on the mother�s stomach and Cindy Crawford jumped onscreen and started talking about the miracle of life. She asked the mother how she felt. She told Oprah the whole experience was amazing. Just amazing. Lord help the stale supermodel who shoves a microphone into my face immediately after I have passed something the size of a small watermelon through a hole the size of a lemon. Seriously, Lord, help her.
This crappy flu/cold/death rattle thing that I�ve got is just icing on the cake for these last few weeks. Two of my favorite coworkers have declared their freedom from our wretched company and will be leaving this week. When they go, I will weep tears of joy because, although misery loves company, misery also loves company escaping because company might find you a job somewhere swanky so you, too, can tell your current employer to give up the ghost and just declare bankruptcy already.
One of my birds, Tahoe, died. I had him for twelve years. He was a lovebird. He was also a she because he laid several eggs throughout his life. I refused to call Tahoe a �she� because I didn�t want to give him some kind of sexual identity crisis. There�s logic in there, somewhere. Anyway, Tahoe was not a nice bird. We referred to him as �little Hitler� because he was always running around the cage, trying to bite people. He was aggressive and pure evil and now, may he rest in peace. I am considering doing something to commemorate my loss, like this woman did.
I have been rejected from all of my graduate schools except for one. I have been accepted by Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The University of Maryland decided that one rejection letter wasn�t enough, so they sent me two letters a week apart. I felt like returning the duplicate letter with a note that read: Why don�t you guys hold onto this and send it to me on my birthday? Anyway, I really, really must get out of this job and do something important with my life. Like learn how to laugh at something other than my paycheck. Seriously.
Also, because I expect to be mentioning some of my general gripes about this, in the past few months I have been diagnosed with something called PCOS. PCOS stands for polycystic ovarian syndrome and it is a bitch. It means that I have a hormone (girl) problem. (If you are a male reader, I make no apologies because insurance companies still pay more for Viagra than for the birth control pill.) It also causes problems with insulin, which means that I have to pretend like I�m diabetic so that I don�t become diabetic. I have to take three different pills every day and have had to change nearly everything that I put in my mouth. I get to go to the doctor and have tons of blood tests. I get to wear a medical bracelet because one of the pills I have to take could cause me to pass out. (I tried to get my office mate at work, April, to memorize all of the medications I�m taking so she could be my invisible medical bracelet. And she did. I would pretend to pass out and she would jump into action�it was amazing. But then, everyone yelled at me and my mom forced me to get a real medical bracelet. Something about being realistic. It was good while it lasted, though. April�I give an outdated and very uncool �shout out� to you because you are a genius and that is probably our best office party trick ever.) Mostly, I get to worry about whether or not I�m infertile (as if being single at this age wasn�t enough, damn it) or if I�m going to end up with diabetes and have my feet cut off or get The Gout. You can see that I never exaggerate.
For those of you who have made it to the end of this entry, I want to make a promise. I promise that I will update this thing more than every two full moons. Also, I promise that I will not always post bitchy, cranky, pathetic entries that make me look like the middle-class white girl without real problems that I am. I�m going to do this for the Tsunami.
