Intermittence

I’m now in the seventh day of being sick (a practice that I find wholly distasteful), and I’m just about ready to give it up.

At first, you know, it was sort of cool. I could blow my nose and spit and make really impressive coughing noises. My voice got all…granular. Crackly. Like Phoebe’s on that episode of ‘Friends’. But then, my throat started to hurt, and my head and neck were next to sign up for the whole soreness campaign, and now I just feel like crap.

That’s nothing, though, compared to what happens at night. My biggest concern at this point is my ever-patient wife, who despite knowing full well what’s really the best thing for me to do, refuses to give her approval to me sleeping in the back room. As a result, while I’m able to finish up my work and get home to rest and drink lots of fluids, she’s stuck in her classroom with too little sleep. She’s too kind for her own good.

I’m heading to the doctor tomorrow to see if Modern Science has produced anything that will give us both relief. If not, I may lose my ever-lovin’ mind.

I figure there are only two or three people in the world who ever even look at this site, so I feel fairly comfortable opening my heart up here….

At the end of every ‘Inside the Actors’ Studio’ episode, James Lipton delivers a bastardized version of the questionnaire invented by Bernard Pivot. I invariably get a little choked up every time he reaches the last question (“If God exists, what would you like to hear him say when you reach the Pearly Gates?”), and I’m not entirely sure why.

Before I give my answer, I think it’s worth explaining that I’m not a religious man. I don’t mean that I don’t attend church, or that I have my doubts about religion. I mean that I have no religious faith whatsoever. I figure I would fit in well with Humanists like Kurt Vonnegut, who believe that morality and goodness spring from within people, and that there is no need for external reasons to do positive things with one’s life. I hope that the religious people I know get what they believe they deserve when their time is up, and I honestly believe that when my time is up the animating force will be extinguished as surely as a candle dropped in a bucket.

Now, I readily accept that my response to Jim’s last question makes no sense in light of what I’ve just explained. Perhaps that’s why it makes eyes fog up—I don’t know. In any case, here you go:

If God exists, what would I like to hear him say when I reach the Pearly Gates?

“Good job.”

I was, it appears, incapable of coming back and saying anything, much less anything interesting, within a week’s time. Let’s set another one-week deadline and see what happens, shall we?