“Do you have to, do you have to,
Do you have to let it linger?”
– lyrics to “Linger,” by The Cranberries

 
I felt better a week ago. It’s into the third week and I’m still fighting this thing. I feel like reheated crap on a stick. Most of today I spent sleeping on and off. As I laid here thinking this afternoon, I couldn’t believe how awful I feel this far in. Most people get sick, they’re BLAH for a week and then they recover. With me, it lingers.

I first noticed this around age 13 when both my father and I got sick. We’d just switched to new health insurance — my first experience with big, bad HMOs — and, as a result, a new doctor. My father quickly recovered and returned to work. At first, I appeared to be on the same track, then suddenly I got worse. It seemed to me like I’d gotten sick again. I ended up being sick two weeks to his one.

That’s the first time I noticed it, but given my health difficulties up to then, I’m sure it wasn’t the first time it happened. After that, I watched it happen time and again.

That’s exactly how it went down this time. By the first Monday, less than a week in, I seemed pretty much over it. I still coughed up gunk, but gunk increasingly thinner and lighter in color. I thought I was out of the woods. All weekend, I’d marveled at the speed of my recovery. Then it went south. By Wednesday, I felt awful again. Here it’s almost another Wednesday later, and I’m no better.

 
Right now, I’m inclined to blame the infection. I’m prone to getting infections when sick, and I’m thinking that is a large contributor to the lingering.

I tried to get away without taking antibiotics. I do not like taking pills. In my 20’s, I frequently let my body fight infections off on its own. This time it’s not going away. I’ve given in and started the antibiotics, and I’m a little distressed and disappointed my body wasn’t able to get rid of this infection itself.

Posted: April 16th, 2008 under Life Journals.
Comments: none

So, the other day I wrote about getting my first MySpace friend, whom I decided to approve even though they were obviously a spammer. Today I went to my MySpace dashboard and noticed “she” was gone.

I originally wondered if spam-ella had put in the request hoping I would give a shout out to her web page the way I had to my first Twitter follower. (It’s possible spam-ella had somehow seen that, either through some blog watching service or Twitter itself.) When she (assuming it really was a she, a dubious assumption) disappeared, I wondered if she got miffed at me not only not giving her a shout out and a link, but calling her out as a probable spammer.

I didn’t have the address of spam-ella’s profile page to go look at. After a brief tiptoe through the browser history, though, I found it. Lo and behold, the MySpace equivalent of the blue screen of death — the user account has been deleted.

Looks like spam-ella’s spamming ways caught up to her. Which leaves me back with only old “default-Tom” as a “friend.” Sheesh. Next thing you know I’ll be paying for it. “Hey, baby, wanna make $5? Got MySpace? Wanna be my friend?”

Posted: April 15th, 2008 under Life Journals, Websites.
Comments: none

Hot on the heels of getting my first Twitter “follower,” I just got my first MySpace “friend,” a (supposedly) 21 year old female from San Diego.

Unlike the Twitter follower, though, I won’t be giving a shout out, mainly because I believe it is a spam type situation. The profile has no picture and the only information entered is a text graphic which talks about how shy she is, but her friends encourage her to post nude pictures, which, of course, MySpace won’t allow, but if you’ll just click through to this dating site and search on her name….

Yeah, right. SPAM! So why’d I allow the friend request? Eh, no-one else has requested, I’m tired of seeing only the one default friend (the mythical “Tom”), and I’m “seeding the tip jar,” under the theory that maybe this will help bring in more, hopefully legit, “friends.” MySpace is a numbers game, and my score is too low to be picky.

But that doesn’t mean I’m going to give said spammer any links from here — though, of course, you can go to my MySpace page and follow the trail down the rabbit’s hole if you like. (I almost wrote “down the spammer’s hole” but given the nature of the spam, that just sounded way inappropriate. :/ )

Coincidentally (or not), the only other communication I’ve so far received on MySpace was also spammish in nature. Someone (again, supposedly female) sent me an email saying she hoped I was single and would write her. Oh, but don’t respond here, she’s using a friend’s account, write her at this completely separate and untraceable Yahoo account….

Yeah, right. SPAM! Ah, if only it were true, but it has all the earmarks: generic in nature, “I’m using a friend’s account,” trying to take things to another location (outside MySpace’s reach), no truly personal information available about the sender (or the friend, for that matter), and most of the “friend’s comments” on the “friend’s” page were spammish in nature, as well (”Wow, this really makes you $90 gazillion in 3 days! Check it out!”). And, really, why would a 20-something girl be emailing hoping to date a nearly 40 year old man when there is so little information about me on the MySpace page? It’s ridiculous.

They can sometimes (not in this case, but still…) make these things very convincing, but I’m not biting, sorry.

Posted: April 12th, 2008 under Blogging, Websites.
Comments: 1

I officially have my first Twitter “follower:” Alex Vorn. I don’t know who he is, but he deserves some acknowledgment for being the discerning individual with excellent taste he obviously is.

You can find Alex on twitter at: http://twitter.com/alexvorn6

He also has an interesting website here: http://gorgeousgadgets.blogspot.com/

Go have a look.

Posted: April 9th, 2008 under Blogging.
Comments: none

If you follow me on Twitter (yeah, right), then you know I’ve been sick the past couple days. I hate being sick. Not that many people enjoy sickness, but I hate it with a passion.

I take illness as a personal affront. I’ve spent so much of my life sick, particularly in my first 16 or 17 years, that I almost feel I should now be exempt, as if we’re each given a certain allotment of sick days, and I met my quota a couple of decades back. Any illness that comes near me now should be in violation of some cosmic law and subject to immediate extinction. Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way.

These days, I probably don’t fall ill more often than the average person, maybe once or twice a year, but it still riles me. It brings up all those wasted years, all that I lost, all that I missed out on. It reminds me that I am still subject to all the faults inherent in this flesh, all that is “common to man,” and that even worse could still await me.

So, while I erroneously think past suffering should somehow exempt me from future suffering, I know that the only permanent escape from sickness is death, if death isn’t the ultimate permanent sickness, that is.

Posted: April 7th, 2008 under Life Journals.
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