The Latest Update; or, The Night of a Thousand Urps

Dear all,

I love that we got comments last time around; thanks!

Well, it looks like all the PhD results have come in, and the answer (from all of 'em) is no. Alas. Boo. There are three programs that I've found--maybe a fourth--that admit for the spring, so we'll see what happens.

It's been a bit demoralizing, I confess, since we were really banking on this one. I mean, now we have to extend our lease, and that alone is enough to make me want to apply to law school.

Note: I will not be applying to law school. (Why make millions saving innocent people from prison when you can tell stories for a living?) Or business school.

I don't know if it's because of that--stress can do weird things to the body--but, Thursday night, my body revolted. "I don't care if you shove seven vitamins down my throat every morning," it said, "but I want to lurch." And lurch it did.

"Body," I said, "I try to take care of you. I feed you healthy foods, some of which actually taste good. I take vitamins and, when those aren't enough, I take antibiotics, plenty of them, enough to enable me to lick the floor of a high-school locker room and remain unscathed, such is the penecillin that courses through my veins."

"Fie!" countered my body. "It's time for you to taste dinner again."

I really must thank my downstairs neighbor, Brian Olsen, who came to my aid. I hadn't started reverse peristalsis yet when I called him--all I knew was that my head felt like a giant zit about to pop. Then my kidneys started hurting, and I was very, very dizzy.

Steve "Spoon" Bitter, are you reading this? Do you remember the time when I got really dizzy, that time with the toilet paper and the Mountain Dew and the pickup truck and the paintball gun with Scott shouting out the window about Ultima Online? Really, I was THAT DIZZY this Thursday.

So Brian came over, saw me careening around my apartment like a drunken sailor, and called a nurse in the ward, because, the way I looked, he wanted to know if I should go to the hospital. She came over (thank you, Dana!) and thought I was dehydrated, which I probably was, and told me to lie down.

Long story short, an hour later, Melanie was home, and my body wanted to show off. Thus began The Night of a Thousand Urps.

Okay, well, it was only three, really, but there was a bit of dry-heaving thrown in there for good measure.

I'm feeling quite a bit better now--not perfect, but pretty good--and I'm grateful, really, because the weekend reminded me of all the synonyms for urping: driving the porcelain bus, doing the technicolor yawn, bringing forth the bounty of the harvest, tossing one's cookies, etc. It's fun for a creative writing professor.

For all who prayed for me, thank you very much. Please keep praying.