Outrageous Self-Indulgence

I've been feeling quiet and downright sorry for myself. Boohoo, I want my pretty brown skin back. I know what the future holds for me, a few years of crazy discoloration, like the opposite of vitiligo. Damn. Nothing makes me feel worse though, than people analyzing my diet, my behavior, my stress levels to see what I've been doing to make this happen to me AGAIN. It's the wine, the wheat, the caffeine, the spicy food. It's my attitude, my sadness, my my my. I've been reading Susan Sontag's Illness as a Metaphor, just to see why some illnesses get tagged as personal failures. All I know is that I haven't changed. I've always been this high-strung, quiet, reclusive woman with a bad sad attitude. Every now and then my immune system kicks into overdrive and kicks my sorry butt for months at a time. Sometimes there are no known identifiable causes, but I'm leaning towards an opportunistic virus.
Are you bored with this story line? I know I am, but I can't seem to take my eyes off myself. Me me me. What's really awful about this is there's nothing to say. Boring.

Roger and I weeded the front yard on Monday. A thin reed of non-native sawgrass, absurdly planted by our predecessors, whipped across my face and left a nice sharp bloody line from my nose to the tip of my chin. Damn. I ran over to Roger and said, "Do you think they call sawgrass sawgrass because it can really cut you? Look at this." We actually had a pretty good laugh about it. Compared to everything else, being whipped by sawgrass is nothing.
I went into the house to clean up a bit and devour some gluten-free rice crackers dipped into delicious dairy-free hummus. I sat at the table looking out the window, camera at hand, thinking about everything-- our atheism, their god, selling our house, moving to Oregon, growing old, making decisions about where we should live based on where it would be best to die-- when a crow decided it should take a look inside the Tree Swallow nest box in case there was a morsel there it would like to devour: A baby tree swallow, or an egg waiting to be one, no bad attitude, bad diet, or bad behaviors.

This is everything. No lie.