OK, so I’m a little pink baby swaddled in his own selfishness, self-pity and snot.
I’ve been moping around for days about the whole assuming-defeat-and-not-being-informed-otherwise thing with the writers’ conference I wanted to attend. I’ve been in a bad mood this whole time and I haven’t been able to stop wondering why Judge Julius won’t return my emails about the conference. I’ve checked my mail about 35 times today already because, even though I know in my heart I didn’t make the scholarship, the lack of closure has got me all crazy in the head. I even moved all my inbox stuff into an archive folder so my new email would show up quicker after a refresh. Plus it’s hard to miss new mail in an otherwise empty inbox.
As soon as I got all that cleared out I polled the mailserver again and–bink!–there was the email that’s changed my whole outlook.
It wasn’t from Julius or the writing workshop folks, though. It was from a guy I used to do improv comedy with, and somebody I’d probably even consider a friend. He’s got three sons now (I only met the oldest, and he was a foot long and curly at the time) and the newest arrival, whose name is Feller, has been in and out of the hospital with the respiratory problem that’s so dangerous to infants. Bob and his wife have been stretched long and far over the past few months taking care of the boys (and trying to take care of themselves), and his email was a call-in of all the favors his friends and family have offered since Feller was born.
The asking for help wasn’t really the thing that twisted my guts and made me feel like such a schmo, but rather the subject of the plea: something better to eat than macaroni and cheese once in a while. Spank. Life is a lot rougher for Bob than it is for me if he doesn’t have time to make anything more complicated than a presto-magic-whip-it-up-quick meal. Thanks to my wife I’ve been eating like a king for 11 years and, no matter how bad I thought my life was, I always had good food, a loving wife and someplace to sleep. That’s not to say that Bob is homeless or has a crappy wife, though. Home and spouse are both good. It’s just… what is it? It’s a life in constant near-crisis is what it is, and Bob and his wife are making it through without all the drama and hysterics that I would bring to the table under such circumstances.
So I need to just go ahead and shut up, I reckon, about this whole writing workshop deal. Burt, one of the network guys at my office, sent me a nice email the other day, and it’s a bit of good advice that I really should take:
“Don’t cry little baby. You cry like a little gurl! HAha…little gurl!!!!1!”