Dilemma

Last night, I dreamt that I was standing in the kitchen talking to my kids. All of a sudden, the ceiling crashed down on me, along with thousands of gallons of water. The kids laughed at me!!!

So...

Should I punish them?

The Dumb

I really hate being one of those dumb people. I hate the fact that everyone has to tell me what to do, how to do it, or that I should or shouldn't do something.

My house is flooded thanks to the endless rains of the past 200 years. But see, all her friends told her that there's no way the house should be flooded because I have French drains and two sump pumps.

Now I can just ignore all that water. It just isn't supposed to be there. So I'll put away the boots, the hoses, the Shop Vac, etc and sit and watch TV the rest of the time. Isn't that great?

Yep, those friends who earn millions of dollars a year being Experts on Everything on Earth save me so much trouble. The same folks who told me I was way too young to have a cancer a few years ago saved me countless rounds of chemo. Who needs Doctors when I have EEE's.

Anyway, I'll be downstairs swimming in the mirage.

It's not really there.

I hate being dumb.

Lease?

What has happened to me over the last month is so cliché that I'm embarrassed to even write about it because I can't do it without sounding like a bad novelist. But I have to do it. I'll take the chance.

I have a new lease on life.

That does not mean that from this day on that I'm going to look at the world through rose-colored glasses. There isn't going to be some magical transformation into Pollyanna or something. I'm still me. Just different.

I almost died. That is not a statement I made of my own volition. I was told by a fully-qualified medical doctor that the person who brought me to the Emergency Room saved my life. I was officially stupid on Friday night, February 12th. On that night, I became one of those people who insisted I knew better, that I was in control of my senses. I was an idiot.

Thank God, she was not an idiot. The doctor told me that, with what I had wrong with me, I was lucky she won out, and I was lucky to be alive.

That's pretty strong language, right?

I don't much like the thought of being dead. I know I will be someday, but now would not be a good time. I have people who depend on me, who love me, who like me with air in my lungs and who are glad that I am on this side of the dirt.

I'm trying to be a little silly with this because otherwise it makes me want to cry. A doctor wouldn't say that if it weren't true. There was no audience. Only he and I were there.

I'm having those moments of cognition. I see my kids with clearer vision. And yeah, the food I'm able to eat tastes a little better. And the dog even gets a little more attention. The world isn't nearly as annoying lately.

I spent 8 days in a hospital bed, in a very good hospital. And anyone who is familiar with the way HMO's and insurance companies run the medical field these days knows that 8 days means I must have been really, really sick.

I was.

And I haven't smoked a single cigarette (though that wasn't the root of the problem) since that Friday. Almost a month.

So, I like things a little better these days. And I don't smell as badly as I must have when I was a human chimney.

I do still like boots though, so as I said, I'm still me.

I feel as though I was an episode of "House, MD". Not completely uncool.

And I feel as though my Blogging Muse has repossessed me.

Thanks for the time you spent reading this. I hope you'll be as glad I'm not a corpse as I am at the moment.

Some Things Never Change...

For about the past 10 years I have used Comcast as my service provider, and cannot say enough good things about it. I absolutely loved their services and would highly recommend them

During that time, I had a very fleeting relationship with another company, America Online. I never much went for them; their company treated clients as if it were doing them a favor by allowing them to pay for mediocre service with a terrible performance record. Their business became 100% focused on servicing their advertisers, often at the expense of the clients.

Well, as misfortune will have it, I am moving to an area that is not serviced by Comcast. It will be traumatic for me! Over the last two days I have investigated the possibility that AOL had actually progressed.

It has not. In fact, it's worse than ever. I tried sending an email through them. I got redirected to some "AOL Challenge Page" where I guess I had to prove I was a human or something. The funny thing is, AOL has all these "SPAM-blockers" in place, yet my AOL account continues to be the source of the most spam emails out of all of my accounts. Anyway, the challenge page did not load. I got an error page. I went to their Home page at AOL.com. That page is down. (How the hell does a company of that size allow its homepage to go down?)

Well, this is mostly meaningless venting. I cannot believe how backward AOL remains in this day and age, and needless to say I will not be employing that amateur shop as my ISP. I'm sure some kid with one server in his garage would be more reliable than this joke of a company.

I'm checking out Optimum Online now.