Me at 12 with my birth father, Bill Weichel in FL
Golly gee willikers, sometimes I’m my own worst enemy, I swear! Remember I told you I have telephone reluctance? Well, I still haven’t made that simple call to the doc for my appointment and I think now I have to call as soon as the office opens this morning….
I’m a little wonky this morning and I have some congestion in my chest again. My back hurts up behind my rib cage. Not good. I hope to heck I didn’t just fool around and start up with pneumonia again. You see, the problem with that stuff is that once I get it, I have a tendency to keep getting it back. This is a regular thing for me in the winter and I really wish it would just quit it. It always catches me by surprise. It starts with just not feeling my usual “roadrunner” self and then progresses to being more and more tired….not sleepy, just tired. Then the backache starts. Funny thing, I never really cough, which is what you think of when someone has there lungs all clogged up, right? No, mine is more of a slow drowning, I think.
All of you that see me on a regular basis know that I am a smoker. Save the lectures on quitting, I have been trying to quit longer than I can remember. I have been smoking since I was 12 years old. My mom was a smoker until the age of 68. She caught me smoking at age 12 and being the smart parent that she was, thought she would use reverse psychology on me. She told me that if I was going to smoke, I’d do it in the living room. Her reasoning was that I was just doing it to be cool and that once the thrill of sneaking behind her back was removed…I’d quit. Not! I went to school the next day proudly proclaiming to my 6th grade class that I was allowed to smoke. THAT made me cool, for sure!
Well, actually nothing made me cool back then. I was the stand-out stranger, from somewhere else geek, everywhere I went to school. In 6th grade, I stopped growing. So, here’s me at 12…picture it in your mind…..tallest kid in school (5 ft 9), completely developed…read BIG boobs, coke bottle bottom glasses….I mean thick! Top that off with being a bit of a brain, and always the new kid and you have a train wreck that gets bullied and badgered, right? Oh, hell yes. At one point in 7th grade at Loch Raven Jr.,(by then, luckily I had contact lenses) the 9th grade boys would sing the starting sounds to the Pimlico horse track stuff ( ba-ba-bumpa da bumpa da bumpa da bum) and announce me as “Here comes “Man ‘O War” (the horse)when I would come down the hall. I could go on and on because it went on and on all through high school. Looking back, I realize I was quite lovely and they were all just assholes. My reward is that I turned into a smart, grounded, loving person and they are mostly still stuck right where I left them in dead end lives and probably still judging people and hating their own lives.
So smoking was my friend, sometimes, my only friend…. It’s been really hard and I’ve tried everything to quit. I even followed the clinical trials for Chantix, eagerly awaiting it’s debut on the market. I was the first to ask my doc for a prescription. I was sure that was going to be my answer and I was finally going to be through with this disgusting habit. Sure enough, it worked like a freaking charm! I quit for 4 months, no anger issues, no cravings…SWEET! Then, all of a sudden my personality totally changed and I found myself actually plotting Rob’s demise. You laugh…this was NOT funny. I seriously have never come so close to cold, calculated murder in my life. I almost RAN to the doctor.. I was one of the first to alert the company to the terrible side effects. There are now black box warnings on Chantix. If you ever use that stuff, be very, very careful. I tell everyone I know to have their loved ones keep an eye on their personalities because it really can turn you into a monster. Of course, as soon as I went off the drug…back to my little friend I went.
So, here I sit, little weird rumblings in my chest, a little tightness and I KNOW I have to call Sandy this morning and it’s making my stomach hurt from the stress. It’s going to interfere with my life as I like to live it. I have this fantasy that if I ignore things, they’ll just go away on their own. Pneumonia doesn’t believe in fantasy, now does it? I really need to grow up sometimes.
But darn it, this weekend is the Super Bowl and I have plans. I’m making an awesome new recipe..it’s a red wine syrup that you boil down to yummy sweet goodness and I have some fresh mozzarella, some of Scott Sower’s great artisan bread, grapes and greek olives that I’m gonna drizzle it over to take to the Moose. It takes 3 bottles of wine to make a pint of this stuff. Is your mouth watering yet? I ain’t no wangs and buggers type of Superbowl chick…ya see?
Crap, do you see my conflicted self here? I’ll call, of course, I’ll call. Not calling will not make it go away, dammit. People always say they are sick and tired of being sick and tired. I’m the billboard……………where’s that freaking number…..
So fail. Be bad at things. Be embarrassed. Be afraid. Be vulnerable. Go out on a limb or two or twelve, and you will fall and it’ll hurt. But the harder you fall, the farther you will rise. The louder you fail, the clearer your future becomes. Failure is a gift, welcome it. There are people who spend their whole lives wondering how they became the people they became, how certain chances passed them by, why they didn’t take the road less travelled. Those people aren’t you. You have front row seats to your own transformation, and in transforming yourself, you might even transform the world and it will be electric, and I promise you it will be terrifying. Embrace that; embrace the new person you’re becoming. This is your moment. I promise you, it is now, now, not two minutes from now, not tomorrow, but really now. Own that; know that deep in your bones and go to sleep every night knowing that, wake up every morning remembering that and then…keep going. Unknown
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