I got a flu shot today. A lady named April came at me with a big fucking needle.
And now I have guilt that I just swore up there. But honestly, that’s the most appropriate adjective I can muster when confronted with a needle. And really, it’s appropriate in the Freudian sense as well. Because of the penetrating and stuff. And sometimes I wish I had a penis. No, not really, but that’s my favorite Freudian joke ever.
My arm hurts.
I did preplan for the shot, which I’m very proud of and feel like an actual adult. I wore a cardigan sweater with a short-sleeved t-shirt underneath so that I could slip off the sweater and expose my meaty grandma arms to the nurse. Or the sadist. Whichever. And I went to the store at lunch and felt completely vindicated in purchasing a large Ghiradelli chocolate bar with caramel inside, like the one I inhaled on the plane coming back from San Francisco and while writing my Journal Con entry. Because chocolate makes both flu shot whininess and the Post-Online Community Turned Into Real Life Community angst go away.
I hate getting a flu shot. I hate all of the questions. They’re so serious. “Have you ever had a bad reaction to a flu shot before?” Yes. It hurts like a mofo and usually it makes me squint when you’re sticking me and then I usually whine a lot and my back gets a little sore that evening and I need a big mug of chicken & stars soup to make it feel better. I suppose that’s not really a bad reaction. It’s an inconvenient one. “Are you allergic to eggs?” What kind of question is that? Am I allergic to eggs? Not that I know. But what if I am? What if I don’t eat enough eggs to know that I’m allergic to eggs? What if I’ve suddenly developed an allergy to eggs in the last week since my weekend Pancakes and Scrambled Eggs breakfast? What if I AM actually allergic to eggs but the pancakes and maple syrup counteract the allergy, thus making it seem as though I’m not actually allergic to eggs and now I’ve been completely mislead and the scary flu shot will send me into anaphylactic shock and then I won’t get all of my work done and I’ll get hives and itch for a month the way I did during the entire month of July? What if that? Huh?
And now as I’m typing this, my hands are cold and I’m wondering if that’s a symptom of being allergic to eggs and then I will most likely die.
Ok, maybe not so much with the adult thing.
In other news, after chatting with Jake about my best friend MoPie’s hilarity in the Sim world, I ran out to the local media blitz place and purchased The Sims Unleashed. And a Michelle Branch CD. And a hands free unit for my cell phone. When I need instant gratification, I do it in a big way.
Then I installed it. And I ran out of storage space, because I have 10.5 gigs of mp3s on my Frankenstein computer. And then I deleted a bunch of stuff, emptied the recycle bin, and tried again. And then it bombed. Can’t Find Sims Data Drive, which in EA-ese means “Sorry, Bitca, you’re going to have to reinstall each and every damn Sims disk you own and whoops, don’t forget to make backups of all your clever little houses and people!” Gah. Every time. Every damn new release. It goes without saying. That’s why I never installed Hot Date, actually, because I knew that I’d end up having to uninstall and reinstall from the beginning and I just didn’t want to go through it.
And all of my Simmy goodness needs to be backed up first, if they’re not already gone. Like the Trailer O’Evil. It’s a paneled white trash paradise with a Velvet Elvis and a Velvet Last Supper and a beer sign and Astroturf for carpeting and all the furniture in the living room is actually lawn furniture but it’s got a state of the art entertainment center. Darth Vader Sim lives there and makes blueprints for an elaborate Death Trailer, which will have the ability to obliterate other Rebel Sim Houses and then a thousand Sim voices will cry out and then be no more. Or my enormous Swedish Modern house, where all the residents are named after Wagnerian characters. Most of them died, though, during the great Gerbil Plague of 2001. It was a sad day. Well, Darth wasn’t sad because he didn’t like any of them anyway. None of them wanted to rub up against his black plasticy salty badness. Actually, maybe he killed Siegfried and Biterolf. Regardless, Torvald is still in mourning.
After arguing with my piece of crap PC, I called my husband at work, because it was 9:30 at night and he was working, and said “Husband, you are rebuilding my piece of crap PC this weekend, and I need a bigger hard drive, so do whatever it takes.” Because I’m very authoritative like that when I’m grumpy, and “whatever it takes” means “spend the money I was going to spend on flooring for the kitchen and living room”. He got a bit gleeful at this, because it was an opportunity to spend money on computer parts. Thus, sometime in the next three days, I’m getting a new PC of my very own and not simply inheriting Esteban’s discarded old technologies. And perhaps Darth and Torvald are not really gone. And perhaps my PC will stop freezing and giving me the Blue Screen of No Fun whenever it gets cranky. And perhaps I’ll get to actually play a game developed in this century.
Go me.
I’m allergic to eggs. I’ve definitely suddenly become allergic to eggs. I can tell because my mouth feels sort of strange and my chocolate is all gone. This is the beginning, right here. The beginning of the end. I will be dead before my time, or perhaps just swollen up into an unrecognizable ball, like a pasty white Violet Beauregard. I will have been to Georgia and California but I will have never been to me.
I had a strange dream last night that Pete and I went to Lillith Faire in the car I used to drive when I was 16 (which was a 1972 poop brown Grand Prix that had no heater nor radio and could only hold 5 gallons of gas without spilling unleaded all over the road but the speedometer went to 150 and it really did go that fast, although you could actually watch the fuel gauge sink as you pressed the accelerator) which was being held in Iowa somewhere but when we got there, it was actually a rodeo. I’m certain I’m really precognitive and that was a portent of my doom. I’m pretty sure that bronco-busting and plaid snap shirts mean Death By Flu Shot. It’s all there in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Seriously. I am not making that up, either.
