Cooler than You: Stupid Things I Say and Do

There's something to be said when I willingly take a round of prednisone.  Clearly, I'm on a crappy road of pain, fevers, rashes, and exhaustion.  This time I'm only on it for seven days, but sevens days can feel like a lifetime . . . sometimes.  A decade ago I took several rounds of prednisone, and they were the extended rounds of a couple of months.  One word: unpleasant.  When I went on it this time my mother said she's glad she doesn't live near me (and she didn't a decade ago as I was in NM and her in VA).  When I called the house two nights ago she hesitantly answered the phone.  Clearly, she was fearful that the prednisone had sent me into an emotional flurry of fire, rage, and cloudy gray.  It hasn't.  An old friend, who lived through predinsone 90s-style with me, keeps reminding me to not kill my students.  She seems very afraid that I'm going to get all ragey and go apeshit.  Naw.  Not this time.  Besides, I'm to...

These days I've been thinking a lot about what has transpired in the past year. Last year this time I was fretting away the days until a defense, battling severe anemia, and then there was that pesky surgery on the horizon. Don't forget I was staring the prospect of unemployment in its ugly face. Funny how much things have changed, and it is also funny at how they haven't come that far from where they were. Last month I realized that I hadn't gone out much in almost two years. That was when things started, well I should reword that. That was when the health started to go sour. I didn't feel like explaining so I let that conversation make me sound like more of a loner and nerd than I really am. I defended just fine, had the bloody surgery four days later (yes, a bad pun I know), and things went awry. What I let people know is that there was an unplanned blood transfusion, which coincidentally gave me my bat wings. And seriously, for those of you that are ap...