Danger! Inflated Sense of Self-Importance Ahead!

If you think anxiety can be pounded back into the woodwork by a few measly sessions on the meditation cushion, you are so wrong. Shortly after I stopped pounding my head against the keyboard and sent in the synopsis, the truck of Wholly Sheep What Did I Just Do pulled up in front of the house right on schedule and dropped off a crate. Pretty soon I was so nervous I started vibrating, the cats ran to hide and even the house cockroaches (there probably are some, it's an old house) thought of something really important that they had to be doing in, oh, say, Denton County.

Times like this I used to either drink an entire bottle of champagne by myself with no help, or go to Szechuan Pavilion and clean out the buffet. Now I'm both abstinent and annoyingly sober, so my most readily available nervous outlet is to bug hell out of Joan with stupid questions about what I could have sent instead, like, "Do you think I should have done X? What about Y? Hey, maybe Z would have been the best choice." This is the literary equivalent of changing your mind about what you're wearing once you're already at the party. At some point I started relating a story that someone in my writing group had told me and I started tapping on the table so the Devil wouldn't hear me. (Lengthy post on this particular superstition to follow at some point.) Joan said, "You aren't superstitious or anything, are you?" and I said, "Heck, no. It's not like I'm in a high risk profession." Joan gave me this look that makes me feel like I'm about six and covered with mud and said, "Jen, crab fishermen are in a high risk profession. You sit at a keyboard and type things."

Well hey, it's true. But it's not the fault of the crabs that they don't have keyboards.