Feeling Sorry For Myself, Inc.

Hello all. I am sick, mopey and feeling sorry for myself. I think I just have a cold, since I'm not running a fever or "progressing southward." It just so happens to be a long weekend, though, in which I had fond ideas of going to the North Texas Mensa RG and hanging with the smart folks, riding my bike around the lake a couple of times and lots of other stuff I'm not actually up to doing. Well, to be honest I did go to part of the RG this morning and heard a fascinating lecture on how the Mafia killed JFK, followed by another one on the leadership skills of Julius Caesar. In between there were games of Scrabble and one of Are You Smarter THan A Fifth Grader (answer: Not so much) and a pretty decent, if not exciting, trivia lunch. But then I got very tired and had to head home, wrap up in a blanket and apply cats topically.

Luckily for me, there's lots of food in the house. Or maybe that's not so lucky. Anyway, there's food. I'm craving bread and butter above all things. No idea why, but if I could get away with chowing down an entire stick of butter I'd probably do it. Yes, my doc just fiddled with my doses of meds. Yes, me and food get weird every single time somebody fiddles with my doses. No, I don't think that's fair. Yes, it's fabulous that I haven't gained any weight. Look, I'm feeling sorry for myself, okay? Quit bugging me with all this positive thinking crap.

I do have some honest to God good news to report, though. One of my query letters got a nibble. Well, at least a reply. No, I think it counts as a nibble. The agent had some good tips and when I responded with a question, she actually answered it (oops, I said she. Okay, it was a she. That narrows it down to half the literary agents in the country, excuse me for living.) Anyway, that was pretty cool. I gotta do some stuff to my query letter which I'm kind of avoiding by writing this blog post.

Tammy was over here a while ago, picking up the leftover lasagna of which there was tons. She's pretty good company. And in about an hour I'm probably going to lose consciousness because that's just how it goes for me anymore (pox on the whole circadian rhythm thing, anyway.) But maybe I'll feel better tomorrow. I certainly hope so. Being sick sucks. So I go back to tinkering with my query letter. Maybe I can still get a few more out before the other NaNos.

Hmm, I should throw in something Buddhist-y. Okay, how about this: "Freedom means being able to choose how we respond to things. When wisdom is not well developed, it can be easily obscured by the provocations of others. In such cases we may as well be animals or robots. If there is no space between an insulting stimulus and its immediate conditioned response, anger, then we are in fact under the control of others. Mindfulness opens up such a space, and when wisdom is there to fill it one is capable of responding with forbearance. Its not that anger is repressed; anger never arises in the first place." -Andrew Olendzki, " Calm in the Face of Anger ," Tricycle, Fall 2006.

Okay? Okay. I'm going now.