XXX. Not a MacGuffin

So, I found my way to the Paris Review interviews via my long-lived bickering with Jason about the worthwhiliness of Joan Didion. The interview from the late 70s is available free online but the one from 2006 or so you had to pay for, which turned out to be for the best because I discovered the new one is in the book Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1. Or maybe I found the old collection The PARIS REVIEW Interviews: Writers at Work: First Series at that used bookstore on Belmont first, which has the old Didion in it.
In any event I was prompted to order the newer collection The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1 from the library and it might be my favorite book of all time. I now own four collections of these interviews and these books are amazing. I haven't worked my way through all of them but I've read all of the one I got from the library and, for real, anyone who ever though of him or herself as a writer or who simply enjoys literature would be well-served by reading these interviews.

It was such a profound, invigorating experience. Put me in touch with lost parts of myself, put big chunks of the world (and myself) in a clearer perspective.
blah blah blah

It's one o'clock in the morning so I don't know what I'm talking about but I just wanted to enthuse for a minute because I really did love this book. Like a blessing, it was.

Well, I guess my life of late mostly consists of sleep, work, reading, and visiting the Jew in Chicago.
The L word's been tossed back and forth a few times lately. So I guess it seems like things are going well.
It's a new kind of relationship for me.
It lacks the sort of psychological intensity of my friendships and such, which I think is a good thing in this relationship.

Reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and enjoying it quite a bit. My new goal post as to whether a novel is worth my time is that it be better than Middlesex, which was just enjoyable enough to warrant reading. This book is certainly better than that. With 60 pages to go, we'll see how it turns out. It certainly seems kind of ambitious. His linguistic dexterity is mostly impressive and the construction is, at the very least, promising. It's six pretty engaging, somewhat interconnected stories all in different voices and different styles and we'll see how well they all come together.

Went to see Fatih Akin's new film: The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite). He's certainly shaping up to be a reliable filmmaker, it seems. I gave it 4.5 out of five stars.
I'm really excited about Guy Maddin's new one though: My Winnipeg. Starts Friday at the Music Box. Looks delicious.

Has anyone seen Savage Grace?
The Fall?
What did you think?

I miss Jesse, even though he's been appallingly negligent.

We have a new assistant manager at work. He seems to be the most promising new hire since me.
Maybe even since before that ;-)
But I'm so bad at interacting with new people. I don't know what it is but it really takes me a while to get comfortable around people. He must think I'm standoffish but I'm sure it'll be fine, all in all.

This movie is the strangest kind of kitsch.
Like some weird music video campiness.
At turns effective but often ridiculous or simply irritating.
Now that I've seen it I'd wholly agree with the critics who said Casey Affleck had been nominated for an Oscar for the wrong movie. The right movie having been Gone Baby Gone.

I feel like the hoopla was a bit misguided on this one.

Having trouble sleeping and instead of finishing Lust, Caution or playing word games on Facebook or turning the light on and reading the Borges interview in the book of Paris Review interviews I have from the library, I thought I'd post something. It's been a while and I figured I must have something knocking around up there.

I guess something definitely shifted in me during the four days I spent in Northern Wisconsin for my nephew's funeral and such. I don't know what it even is. I guess what I know is that I thought I understood things for a while but I've come to see that I confused a strong wish for understanding with actual understanding. Maybe it's that I just turned 30 and though I haven't been framing it that way in my head, I have in fact been reassessing things. My dreamy approach to life, for example. There is something hanging over me for which I hunger intensely. I just don't know what it is.

I don't get enough sleep. I'm always tired. But I'm still haunted by the same insomnia of my adolescence, not an inability to sleep but rather a disinclination, almost desperate. Like these quiet night hours are so precious and I don't want to let them pass by. It occurs to me that what I'm dealing with here is something more general: that I need to learn to make compromises. I need to economize my various resources, such as time.

I've been spending weekends with this guy in Chicago. Sometimes I think it's only at the weekends that I've been really feeling alive. I'm in a rut, for the most part. And I should like to feel alive all the time. Sometimes I'm out walking and I'll sort of exult in the beauty of the world. But it almost feels a shadow exuberance, the way amputees have shadow limbs. Is it exuberance, or yearning, or simply a wistful sort of joy... Or maybe Milwaukee handicaps my spirit like Harrison Bergeron's whatsit handicapped his brain.

And I'm certain that this romantic situation is helping me to get to know myself better. I guess that's always the way when you're trying to let new people get to know you or when you're getting to know new people. Also when you find yourself in completely new situations.

It occurs to me that it's even more important than I thought to go back to school. It's becoming ever clearer to me that my proletarian circumstance is such that if I do not make some kind of scholarly achievement I will be working at an awful hourly job for the rest of my life. Or something. It's getting to the point that it doesn't matter what I want to do with myself as long as I can think to do anything.

I have this sort of well of yearning which has much of my life been rather inadequate. Often verging on nonexistent. But I feel this ball of yearning welling up in me.

It's all kind a whirligig, I guess. I feel what I've always felt: that I'm almost desperate for some pure light to guide me. When I was an adolescent I imagined I felt a sort of fatherly presence hanging over my life. I imagined my father had died and in the afterlife come to care about me after all and was watching over me. Sadly, he's still alive and never cared but that's a red herring so don't get hung up on that. I look to my grandmother or my aunt who've passed on. I guess religion gives you this abstract box to put your faith in and when you discard religion you might not realize that you'll be left without a wagon to keep it in. And eventually you find that you've been struggling to maneuver this unruly mass of disparate objects and, sigh, well, I guess I need a box.
It's like, when I lived in Germany, my better angels were the idea of my mother and my sisters.
But when they're so close you can't really idealize them like that. With the sadness and turmoil and all the rest.
I don't know how to say this so it makes sense. Just that there is a flame in the forest that burns a pure blue and calls to me. Or maybe it's rather what I've been calling into being throughout my life.

Sometimes I just feel so weighted down.
It occurs to me that instead of putting my twilight thoughts on the internet I should have just read The Waste Land, or perhaps the newish book of Rilke translations I bought the other day.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

went to see gogol bordello last night. everyone thought i wouldn't like it but i actually thought it was really fun.
i mean, it was too hot and the audience was irritating to me but I enjoyed the show. also enjoyed the opening act.

just bought a ticket for the sunday of pitchfork music festival.
that should be fun.

debating whether or not i could cope with lollapalooza.
or its 200 dollar price tag...

My little sister's three month old son died unexpectedly on Thursday.
It's been a long few days.
I planned on making a long post about these days but I'm tired and we'll see if I feel chattier once I've slept.
I'm thinking of reading War & Peace but I'm intimidated.
That's part of why I'm so anxious to read it.
But I wonder if I should start first with Anna Karenina.

Just over 300 pages into Camille Paglia's Vamps & Tramps I've realized it makes perfect sense that I enjoy reading this book.

I've always been drawn to stories of women on the edge of sanity.

I think it goes back to the reason that Mark and I really liked Didion's Play It As Lays but Jesse and Jason did not.
It's because Mark and I are essentially the neurotic-female-as-gay-male type whereas Jesse and Jason fit more into the unbalanced-man-as-reluctant-homosexual persona.
So Mark and I got Maria because we kind of are her. Perhaps?
But unlike Camille Paglia and us, I don't know that Jason and Jesse have that same blend of the male and female brain and are therefore hopelessly mired in masculine psychology.
Poor kids.

Of course maybe that has nothing to do with Vamps & Tramps. Maybe I enjoy it rather for the same reason I was fascinated with schizophrenia and so forth as an adolescent. It's sort of a blend of phenomenology and sensationalism.
Despite that I approve of many of Paglia's arguments, such as that people need to know more about history before they go around spouting foolishness, I don't want you to be frightened. It's a fun book to read but I'm certainly aware that she's kind of a nutjob and a brat.

:-D

LIST #2: The World's Top 10 Disco Classics

1. Irene Cara, "Flashdance" (Giorgio Moroder)

2. Donna Summer, "Rumour Has It" (Giorgio Moroder)

3. Jackie Moore, "This Time, Baby"

4. Sylvester, "Stars"

5. Lime, "Angel Eyes"

6. Machine, "There But For the Grace of God"

7. Evelyn Champagne King, "Shame"

8. Pamala Stanley, "Coming Out of Hiding"

9. Gloria Estefan's cover of Vickie Sue Robinson's "Turn the Beat Around"

10. Madonna, "Deeper and Deeper

from her website

I've been reading Vamps & Tramps: New Essays from 1994. I've been kind of thinking that much of the controversial things she said in the early 90s may have just been before their time. I guess once I realized that much of the writing she does is her having fun, being funny or being provocative, I opened up a little to what she had to say. It's amazing to me that she hasn't published a book of essays since 1994. I mean, she must have published other articles than the Salon.com column or her book on poetry in the intervening 14 years. I should add the caveat that while much of what she's had to say has been before its time some of it remains kind of out there. :-)

Which reminds me that after reading Political Fictions I was curious to see what Joan Didion had to say about the Bush administration, or even the current primary or state of the nation or what have you, but all I could find was an essay on Terri Schiavo and an essay on Dick Cheney which I did not cough up money to read online. I did however read her interview from 2006 or so from the Paris Review and that was all right.

So, the summer after my "rehabilitation" (two years ago) I was walking one day--I did a lot of walking then--and I decided that my great trouble had always been an inability to focus. It was a rare moment in my life where I felt focused. I thought it was something I would be able to hold on to. When I found myself distracted by some stupid little drama or annoyance or something I ended up thinking in these car metaphors...

When my mother was teaching me how to drive I had trouble staying centered in the lane and she told me it was because I was fixated on the lane markers, that I was looking too close in front of me. Her advice was that I needed to keep my eyes on the horizon, where I wanted to go, and I'd just kind of get there, as though I were on autopilot essentially.

A few years later I was driving one day and someone remarked that my windshield was so dirty he didn't know how I could drive that way. (Yay for road salt!) My response was something else I learned from my mother, that it was simply a question of paying attention to the road or the grime on the window. Looking at the dirty window or through it.

These are hardly brilliant or greatly insightful metaphors but I remember back to stressful days where I'd hold my hand vertically against my face and push it out to point at the horizon. Onward. I had so much hope then. And I had courage and I had good deal of faith in myself as well. It's clear that I kind of lost myself that fall. I guess I didn't quite have the life skills, the "coping skills" I kept hearing about in the counseling I had to complete. Especially during the hard process where I quit smoking. I guess I was drinking too much for a while as well. I think I function best when I'm not really drinking much.

I feel like I've lost myself in all these little distractions.

I was thinking about that bit in The Orchid Thief (also Adaptation) where Susan Orlean decides the point of these little passions is that they whittle the world down to manageable size. And maybe that's it. It takes a lot of courage and a good deal of strength to face the world head on. And maybe I've drifted off into mannerism. Lost confidence, self-assurance.

I was at work today, thinking about some of the reasons I hold back from direct engagement with the world. I guess part of it is that I've always been very comfortable with the outsider status I was assigned at a very young age. Shy. Introverted. Poor. And then you have all the mystical kind of reading I did during my teens where I really lost any taste I might have had for the obscenities of capitalism. Maybe some theorists are right and my appreciation for asceticism is simply the product of millennia of poor people sanctifying their injustices. I'm not sure. I'd say it has more to do with the years in my childhood spent in a remote area of the Great North Woods. (I guess it might be redundant to say it was remote...) I've always found materialism and consumerism as distasteful as the class inequities woven into our way of life.

I don't know, always, when I've heard people talking about "getting ahead" or "making it" I've tended to either sneer or feel a little sad. I mean, I guess there is pathos there that people have been warped by their consumer culture. That they've bought the myth of the American Dream. That they really believe in the myth of Upward Mobility. But then you have to hold yourself and others accountable for their value systems. And there is where I run up against Ayn Rand, with all due respect to Brangelina and the rest of the objectivist armies. I understand that there needs to be a Golden Mean between Walden and Atlas Shrugged but there is something distasteful I've always seen in the marketplace where people auction off their own lives.
And I guess the dream is to get paid for something you're good at and enjoy doing. To be driven not by a desire for consumer products but a drive to be productive.
I guess my problem is that I look at the more than six billion people on the planet clamoring like so many ant armies and can't help but feeling that there's too much production going on already. It's a glut and though I feel no desire to piss on it, I should often like to spit on it.

But now here I am feeling like the grasshopper who suddenly realizes it's winter and I'm not prepared. That is, the economic situation is volatile. And I'm feeling vulnerable and caged.

I guess without going too much further into all of this, the moral is that I need to find a way to make peace in the world within which I am living. Because I've dreamed away the better part of two decades and, well, perhaps there is something better if I'll only step out of dreamland and fathom a fresh, more direct engagement with the swamp of human aspiration.

*"courage, confidence, creativity," one reminds oneself.*

I saw this movie yesterday on my 30th birthday and it was so beautiful I cried and cried and cried.

I really loved it. My brain kept saying it was all little bit cliché but it was just so lovely I couldn't help being won over by all of it. You get the sense that this is an amazing bunch of people without anyone being patronized. It was great. LOVE LOVE LOVE.



I also had a massage for the first time by this healer lady and it was better than just about any drug experience I ever had in my life.
I also had dinner at this excellent little restaurant in the far reaches of deepest Brookfield: Cafe Manna. it was a great little vegetarian joy fest.


And it's all thanks to Anastasia loves me on my berfday.

Thanks for all the love, kids.

I guess most of my childhood I was kind of handled like what I was: the illegitimate child of a previous relationship, though my mother would surely not like to hear me say that.

I guess I could go into the details of the many situations in which I have lived and which were the few I felt at home in. Most recently it was living with Jesse.

But the point of this was to be that I do not feel at home now at all.

I've been spending weekends in Chicago with Zac. I guess it once in a while feels like home.
Or the coming into being of one. I guess it's the way you're at home in a dream.

I don't know. I should have more concrete goals. I should be above, past, and beyond correcting the deficits of my youth.
But I'm not one of those goal-oriented people.
I don't want a condo. I feel like I should be worried about a retirement plan but saving for retirement strikes me as kind of naïvely optimistic. I don't need expensive clothing or jewelry or whatever else it is that people manage to spend so much money on.
I guess I'd like to be able to travel and I know I'd like to have a job that's not quite as embarrassing or, at least, novel.

What's worth selling myself for is what I want to know. I guess a piece of home. And I saw this couple on the red line the other day. The girl looked like a student, Chinese perhaps, and the boy was thin and pointy featured and dark-haired and possibly of eastern european extraction. And there was something about their grace that I found so alluring. And as soon as I figure out what that is, I guess that's what I might wish to want, as it were...

I recently read a few more Joan Didion books: Play It As It Lays, Political Fictions, and The Last Thing He Wanted. I quite liked the first two and thought the third one was just kind of okay. I also quite liked Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The Year of Magical Thinking.

My question is, How do you feel about Joan Didion?

It's like people love her or hate her. I don't know. I really like her work but it's not like I'm putting her on my list of all time favorite writers or anything. Of course, I have a stack of her books left to read so we'll see.

How do you feel? Why? What do you or do you not like about her or her work?
Do you find her work cold and clinical?

(Feel free to check out the score of comments that Jason has left on my myspace and on my review of Less Than Zero at goodreads.com if you need inspiration.)

I'm not asking for you to agree with me. I really want to know what you think.


Also, were you as unimpressed with Less Than Zero as I was?
Is it my fault that I'm not really connecting with The Unbearable Lightness of Being?
Am I wrong for saying that it reads like it was written by a man and by someone with a socialist background and that it was in a way that didn't appeal to me?

EDIT- I guess I should say about The Unbearable Lightness of Being that although I don't really care for much of the psychological and psychosexual content of this book, I like a lot of the political content, such as the bit about comparing the Czech communists to Oedipus.

Despite that I have the dust jacket, I can't seem to find my Susan Sontag book.
Grr.

But I'm watching Nina Simone Live at Montreux and it's fucking amazing.
I feel like I'm hopped up on drugs here.

Like Odetta said last night, if you don't get loose now you'd better forget it because you ain't got much time.


From Play It As It Lays:

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.
Why, BZ would say.
Why not, I say.

I don't know if it's because I'm anxious to get back to Chicago to see my (sugar bear / dolphin prince) or if it's because I'm so thrilled to hang out with April-Dawn and her gay boyfriend Billy this weekend or if time has slowed down to give the democrats more space in which to eviscerate each other or if it's that I've been watching less television or getting less sleep or if it's the effects of spring (which always hangs one up the most) but this week seems to stretch on forever.

Even last night I had my volunteering and I enjoyed that but it was over and I was like, Jesus fucking Christ I can't believe it's only freaking Wednesday! So here I am very late on a Thursday night and I have two more days of work before my weekend can begin.
Before I can feel alive. Yes, if this job stretches out time this much even when it's not as painful as it is at other times, it must be time for a new job.

Also, I read Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays and I feel like I really liked it quite a bit.
Like, The Bell Jar but moreso, it's surprisingly, sneakily good.
It's so simple and spare. But it's like it gives you these puzzle pieces and you put them together and it's not all there but what's between the puzzle pieces is just about devastating. I have seen her prose referred to as sterile and such but I think it might mean more that way. And I guess I find that kind of prose highly engaging. Perhaps because it's like a mystery or a puzzle to figure it out. Or, in many cases in this particular book, it was that so much emotion and experience and assorted informations could be packed into a chapter of like ten sentences. I would read one of these chapters and it wouldn't really strike me at first because the prose is so simple and you just kind of fly past it but as I went on I realized a lot of these scenes are a little more complicated, or at least weighted, than I first appreciated. I mean, maybe I'm saying this wrong. I guess I mean I'd read something and ask myself then what was really being said and, well, I'm terrible at this.
But it makes me think of that video I was loving with Iris DeMent singing "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" with two other women and someone was complaining that I was listening to this idiotic country folk whatever it was he said and I tried to explain that what made the thing beautiful might not be the twanging or the vocal technique or the sophistication or what-do-I-know. I said to him, "This song is about death, particularly the death of the speaker's mother, and yet the musicians all have this joy in their faces and in their voices a bit as well. So, ask yourself what reasons they might be smiling. What functions does this song serve and what does it represent? What is this song really about? Or at least, what is it also about?"
I guess the analogy is imperfect. I'm a terrible communicator. I guess that's something I'd like to work on maybe that's what I'm doing right now.
It's like, there are things that happen in this book and you don't really get it. But then you reread it right away and you see it's all there. These little bits and pieces that so subtly convey the desolation and the desperation of these characters. BZ is tired of doing people this kind of favor. The protagonist is terrified of the calamity that might strike at any moment. She hates herself for being weak and unable to take control of her own life. She hates the people around her for controlling her. Men for using her. I don't know. I really identified with her. I guess I know what it is that she's experiencing in much of this. I really need to start drafting and revising these things before I post them, like I used to. A million years ago. I feel like I want to keep rereading it until I know what it is in these pages that has touched me like it has. I can't stop thinking about it.

I guess I haven't posted one of these in a while so I'm making a little update.

First, there were some concerns about my health and it turned out to be none of the serious things that were suspected. I probably need to have my tonsils taken out. I'm probably hypoglycemic. I probably have more allergies than I am aware of including some food allergy conditions. I should see an Ear Nose Throat specialist and an allergist. I should sleep more, drink more water, exercise more. I should meditate more. I should eat better. Bicycle more.

I've made little progress as far as a career plan goes. I still work at the same awful place. I still have few ideas how I might manage to pay for college. I guess what else I know is that I need to be more industrious.

Speaking of industry, I have been, you probably know, seeing someone particularly special for a couple months or so and he was talking about building something together. And I suppose that's a little more encouraging in the motivation department than the usual reasons.

I saw Laurie Anderson at the Harris Theater. I'd love to see her again.

I've been getting fatigue about the election but there is enough going on in the world to be dazzled by other things, like the plummeting economy.
I've been increasingly enraged by the media. I've been reconnecting with On the Media. I think the press is pretty much the most culpable party in the current world situation. Because the press has abdicated its responsibility. It's vile and loathsome and disgusting. The press we have now is like a side show. A circus. But more like a cross between a circus and a dystopian novel.
Speaking of the media, how in the hell is someone as charisma challenged as David Gregory anchoring MSNBC's Race to the White House?!?

I should be free from probation in just a couple of months. My life is happening. There is a door in front of me and feel like I've barely looked at a map to the world I'll be walking into...

I guess part of me is sad and disillusioned about Hillary Clinton, after having defended the clintons for more than a decade. But I'm also prepared to take it as a metaphor.
Er. It's a symbol. I'm calling this a season of truth. I'm trying to open myself to knowledges I haven't wanted to know.

Iris DeMent.
I can't remember how I came across her. Just that it was while looking for something else on Youtube.
You might, as I did, recognize her from Songcatcher, an enjoyable film from the most recent golden age of independent cinema.

"Our Town"


"Will the Circle Be Unbroken"

Wasn't that video thrilling? For reals. I love the energy and the dynamic in this video. It's so beautiful here. It's really an expression of something I'd be fond of calling virtue. I love their faces and their joy, especially the blonde woman. It reminds me of what I loved about Kenji Mizoguchi's The Last Chrysanthemums. It's a potent look into what gives the relevant social structures their value and what are some of the values are that drive them.

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I love the way the music dances. There's life in the texture of this folksy country bluegrassy liquid music. It's like sunshine or jesus shining in my heart.

So, you'll all recall my Vlad-the-Impaler what-what-in-the-butt cherry-busting post from last fall in which I described my first encounter with being penetrated by a man's penis via my rear entry.
And I guess people have always taken it for granted that I'm a "total bottom" but what I guess I found out last night is you may as well have it both ways because yessir that's also hot.
And that way you don't have to hold your bum for a week.
Except if you trade off.

I adore the Zachary, in semi-unrelated news.

Sooooooooooooo, I meant to head down to the Gene Siskel Film Center for the 3 PM film noir, which sounded just delightful but I've been catching up sleep and I have a feeling it'll wear me out too much, based on recent experience.
And anyway, I shall probably have to be trekking up to Mark's place so we can watch the Resnais videos I got from the library.

We went to see this movie at the Music Box last night called Teeth.
Camille Paglia in a recent column described it as a feminist horror film or something.
The trailer makes it look retarded but it was actually quite enjoyable. It's about a girl with vagina dentata and I thought it would be kind of off-putting or that it would take a while to get into but it really is a fun movie and the audience was definitely into it. It's not too shlocky and it's not stupid either.
lalala, GO SEE IT IF YOU'RE ABLE. AND TAKE ALL YOUR FRIENDS.
It's a fun little movie, especially for a midnight movie.

The jew is occupied all day with work and school. Yesterday I was as a point where I was so worked up with anxiety about my health and such that I really didn't feel like I was myself. I felt cold and, hmm, maybe a little dissociated. But the walking to and from the Music Box theater last night (from Broadway and Belmont) and the talking to James and then Jason on the way back were really therapeutic. I feel not so good today. My stomach hurts and I feel physically weak and kind of dizzy. But I'm feeling better emotionally and psychologically. Yesterday I felt overstimulated and overstressed. I felt like I needed to scream and cry and carry on. And I'm not good at any of that (except sometimes maybe carrying on). I can't describe how this health situation makes me feel. I've been sick for a long time. Maybe it's the chemicals at work. Maybe it's something else. Maybe it's cancer or an autoimmune disorder. Maybe it IS leukemia. I'm all but certain the blood work will come back supposedly fine, assuming someone even looks at it. And then I'll be marked a frail hypochondriac? There are so many things to be afraid of and I'm always telling myself there's no point in getting excited about any of them. "All I need is an action plan involving a better diet and a different job in a less toxic environment." But I feel I only succeed in pushing and squishing the anxiety down into this asphalt strip and that the rest of me might be spread out on top of it but it's always there and just below the surface. I am concerned and I am a little afraid and I have episodes of hopelessness.
But I'm feeling a little better today. And I'm looking forward to cuddling with the Jew, now that my desperate Monster's Ball moment is passed...

At the urging of a handful of family members and friends, I went tonight to the Urgent Care at Froedtert Hospital, which is generally regarded as the best hospital in Wisconsin. Although it was encouraging that they didn't ask for health insurance information until after I had received care, it was not encouraging that they only seemed to care whether my problem was strep throat. After the rapid strep test came up negative they showed me the door. Drink a lot of water, get a lot of rest, and take a lot of Advil. I guess that's the cure to just about everything that might ail you.

Meanwhile I'm probably sporting a compromised immune system, being terrorized by some undiagnosed throat malady that looks kind of like strep throat but more ulcerative and I'm terrified that it might be thrush because I feel like you're only supposed to get that when your immune system is shot. And if it's not something like that how did I never transmit it to the Jew, whom I might very well be falling in love with?

So, I'm waiting for the blood work. Discouraged because I can't seem to find a healthcare provider that gives a rat's ass about me. I'd be tempted to call myself a worrywart or a hypochondriac but anyone who has observed the lovely situation in my throat or the situation in which I have chronic throat infections and reactions to drugs that aren't supposed to have reactions and extreme fatigue and so on, seems more concerned than I am. My sister has apparently been giving details of my situation to her physiology class or whatever it is as an example of the ineptitude of the American healthcare system. I don't know. Half the people I know seem to think I should just not think about it. "LALALA, my throat is, inexplicably, swollen and ulcerative and covered in white stuff and I can barely stand up for five minutes sometimes but I'm sure it's nothing to get worked up about." And the other half are worked up into a frenzy and it's like the one half is telling me I'm worked up over nothing and the other half thinks I'm not treating this with the seriousness it deserves and really i just want a doctor to settle the argument. Give me an explanation and a prognosis and I'll be back to the business of trying to write the great love story with the Jew.

Which brings me to my comic relief:

I sent this text message to a handful of people this morning: Madonna's doing Sunsilk commercials now?!?
Zarah responded: Yes! Isn't that sad. She could at least do Pantene!
Me: I don't understand it.
Zarah: It's not like she needs the money. She's going crazy!
Me: Indeed. Me too... Crazy in LOVE!
Zarah: That's a good crazy. If I see you in a Sunsilk ad expect trouble.
Me:LOL
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