I've been sick, which serves me right since all I've been doing lately is pompously bragging to anyone who'll listen about how awesome my immune system is. How my parents didn't make me wash my hands after every time some kid sneezed in the next block somewhere, how I ate everything served to me, sometimes off the ground, how I flew in planes all the time and was therefore exposed to every airborne, foodborne, sandborne, dirtborne virus known to man. How now I snigger at people who carry moist wipes everywhere they go, open doorknobs with towels draped over their hands, won't use public restrooms, won't eat uncooked fish or any food that hasn't been blasted to the FDA-recommended stage of burnt, and still manage (unsurprisingly) to contract every bug that blows by in the wind.

But even though I generally do still agree with myself that it's healthier to get your hands into everything, run around barefoot, and eat whatever you please (and do also agree with general society that you shouldn't go around LOOKING for illnesses by eating month-old yogurt and using Port-a-Potties willy-nilly) a healthy immune system doesn't always work, and sometimes you get slapped with the stomach flu AND a cold at the same time right after you've finished bragging about how you never get sick. And when that happens, everyone you've bragged to has every right to make fun of you and make faux-puking noises and waft rich, nauseating foods under your nose, and make goose honks behind handkerchiefs.

Instead, upon whining my plaintive whine, I was brought Saltines, grapes, and soda water, and got my back and legs rubbed and cold washcloths placed on my forehead. I always crack about how life is unfair, but forget all those times it is unfair in my favor.

I do think I would be satisfied if I spent the next two years getting on planes and jumping in cars or on boats at the slightest of whims to follow my taste buds around the world. I know that there is a term for this, and it's called a super-mega-important-sought-after restaurant reviewer (also known as: in your dreams). But really. If I were to suddenly become a gazillionaire, after I gave away 80% of it or more, depending on how much a gazillion dollars really is, that's what I would do. And yes, I know that if I suddenly craved Tibetan momos, the craving, and my good temper with it, would probably be gone after 18 hours on an international flight, three different customs forms from three different countries, a tiny wobbling plane struggling through the high winds around the Himalayas, and the crazy long-ass nap I would take upon finding a place to stay. Still. It would be a good jumping point for all sorts of adventure that I wouldn't know how to look for if I just sat here and thought, 'Now, where shall I go look for adventure?

Last time I was down at the creek, four weeks ago, maybe, I happened to be by myself, and the creek happened to be just teeming with ducks: ducks sliding down waterfalls with little bobs, ducks ruffling their feathers as they righted themselves after hitting the bottom or those waterfalls, ducks standing up on rocks stretching their necks and displaying, ducks pecking at other ducks' tail feathers, ducks attempting rape indiscriminately. (If you know me in person, and most of you do, you'll have already heard my 'ducks are the major brutal rapists in the avian kingdom' speech, so I'll spare you hearing it again.) This description, so you know, doesn't even become to come close to making it clear to you just how many damn ducks there were. There were so many, the water was hardly visible. Ducks were coming down waterfalls three, four at a time. Territorial disputes, nay, wars, were going on over three-inch-square patches of sand, or tiny slivers of rock poking out from the water.

Although I called people frantically to get them to come share in this freak-of-nature event, nobody showed up fast enough. I sat on a bench shivering and staring at the quacking, flapping duck quilt until clouds came out and covered the sun. By the time Chris and Eugene showed up, the duck covering was merely patchy, almost a normal level of ducks (if ducks came in levels, like humidity or temperature), and they thought I had been dreaming, or making it up or something.

Anyway, I was down there again yesterday, with Dan this time, and there were still straggler ducks hanging out in the part by the library. They were pretty much done raping each other by now, and were more interested in pulling who-knows-what from between the icy rocks of the bottom. We sat down to watch them, and presently a man with headphones showed up with an entire loaf of freshly bought Safeway bread and started throwing whole slices into the water.

We actually hadn't seen the man at first, but when a slice of wheat bread landed lightly like a Frisbee on the surface of the water and fifty ducks dove wildly into the middle of it and started frantically pecking each other's feathers out for the mere chance at a sliver of the bread, we saw him, nearly next to us, preparing to throw another slice.

There's really no story here. He split the rest of his bread evenly between himself, a man with a dog who wanted nothing more than to have a duck lunch (the dog, not the man [probably]), and Dan and I. We spent some time feeding the ducks and it was good. I hadn't done it for years. The last time I did was probably close to the time I was about seven and fell into Echo Park Lake in Los Angeles trying to crouch down on a mossy rock to get closer to my target duck. Echo Park Lake is more used syringe than water, or was at that time. My whole body itched for days.

Guest posted over at Nora's place today with my miraculous weekend internet that only pokes its head from his shell on very special weekends.

I started typing and it started transliterating into Malayalim! Oh my God! I had to figure out how to make it stop and while I was doing that everything I wanted to say just flew right out my ears. I have a fever and I'm at work and I have a terrible haircut. This is all that's left. I've been trying to decide whether to cut my losses and just cut the stupid haircut all off, which would leave my hair chin length, which I KNOW looks terrible on me, but it's tempting because I think that the current cut looks more terrible. For awhile now I've just been going to Great Clips and everyone keep telling me Great Clips sucks, but they've been so good to me, and the second I betray them by going somewhere else, God suddenly goes completely insane and gives me a Haircut-Specific Smite in the form of an Middle-Aged-Woman Haircut. God and Great Clips are apparently friends. I don't think 'smite' is a noun. I don't know if I have the appropriate writer credentials to just force it to be a noun.

Speaking of forcing words to be different parts of speeches than they're used to, I was in a friend's car coming out from a Chinese restaurant, and a car honked, or didn't honk, or something happened that involved either honking or the conspicuous lack of honking (see... this is what happens when I don't allow myself to embellish, and my memory isn't exact) and he said something like, 'Should I have horned at him?'

'Horn' should definitely be used as a verb all the time. 'Did you see that guy? He cut right across five lanes of traffic to get to the on-ramp, and everyone was horning at him, and he just flipped everyone off!' 'Should I horn at that hot woman in the Kia, or would that be crass?' (Do guys ever consider that, just maybe, it might be just a LITTLE bit crass to horn at women from cars?!)

The innuendo of sexual advance just makes it better. But I supposed there's no innuendal benefit to changing 'smite' into a noun. Scratch 'smite'. But we'll consider 'innuendal'.

Every time I get a massage (not often, but enough to remember that this happens), the pleasure turns my brain to mush and I lay there thinking ridiculous thoughts:

In the future, when we're all engineered, genetically or otherwise, to conform better to our jobs, will massage therapists have hands that automatically generate massage oil with the right nerve twinge from the brain, or, primitively, a touch of a craftily hidden button? Will employers pay for their employees to have this feature installed, and if so, will it be somehow tweaked so that the feature will automatically disable ouside of work hours? Will male employees then pay chip hackers the big bucks to come retweak the chip so it works all the time, and therefore makes masturbation easier? Would the employer somehow have the chip's activity tracked, and then fire the employee for using work materials for personal use? Then could the employee sue the employer for invasion of privacy?

I lay there, I think these things, I think, I love the future. I love massages. And then I get a little panicked and hope that my concentrating so hard on ridiculous future scenarios didn't keep me from feeling the strokes of her hand.

Inadvertently I reminded my mom that I used to lie to her all the time by bringing up corn on the cob.

"What do you think he'll really like me to cook, though?" she asked me, referring to my boyfriend, and dinner.

"Well," I said, "his mom's allergic to corn, so I guess he's never really gotten to eat corn on the cob very often. You could make that."

"We could eat it with chopsticks, just like what's-her-name's family, that girl you were friends with back in... middle school? Elementary school?"

"What girl? You mean Yexin?"

"Yeah, Yexin."

"Her family didn't eat corn on the cob with chopsticks. What are you talking about?"

"You told me they did."

"I did? When?"

"When you were a kid. You came back from dinner at their place once and said that they made corn on the cob and ate it one kernel at a time with chopsticks. You were really excited about it."

"Ummm... I made that up."

"No, you didn't! I remember you telling me."

"And I remember making it up. How could you eat corn on the cob with chopsticks, anyway?"

"I don't know. I guess you couldn't. Why would you make something like that up?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know??"

"No."

It always really bothered my mom that I did that. Once, I guess (this is all via her, because I don't remember) I came home from kindergarten and wove her a long, complex yarn about some kind of kindergarten drama that unfolded all over me that day - it had kids making fun of me, and teachers yelling, and construction paper everywhere, and crying - and when she went in to talk to my teacher about it she found that it had never happened. Not only that, nothing close to it had happened. The day in question was an especially normal day.

I guess that when I came home that day and she asked me that omnipresent question: "How was school today?" I didn't want to say 'Fine' like every other day. I would have rather had a story. Even now the act of saying 'Fine' as a response to anything puts me in a bad mood - 'How are you', 'How's your day going', etc. It's boring. It's small talk and it means absolutely nothing. Not just something shallow, even, but literally nothing. Nobody ever says 'it's going terrible' or 'I'm feeling a bit off today' (even my officemate, who's British, just responds with 'fair to middling' no matter what the situation is). People are always saying 'How are ya!' to me by the water cooler and it makes me visibly cringe, because obviously I am a complete sociopath.

Now that I'm not in kindergarten, I obviously know that I have more than those two options (saying 'Fine' or making up a long, complicated, and completely untrue story). There is always the option of taking the truth and telling it like a story. This isn't hard for me; I've never had a day in my life that I felt could be summed up by 'Fine' - there's always the tiny victories, like a bus coming as soon as you round the corner to the stop, or a man yelling 'you dropped your wallet!' after you as you pedal away from a stop sign, instead of just stealing it and leaving, or the weather warming to 68 in the middle of winter - or the tiny battles, like locking yourself out of your house on the day you have to rush home and get ready for a fancy dinner. These are all true and have happened, and have story-worthy details that I've forgotten only because it's been awhile (except for the fancy dinner one, which happened on Valentines Day). I try to stick to these kinds of true stories now that I am 23 and should know better than to constantly lie to people I love.

But sometimes you just want an explosion, you know? Sometimes you want to have run into your favorite celebrity at the beach. It's not even the attention - I can live without attention; in fact, I prefer it - but rather the thrill of telling it, of inventing it convincingly as I go along.

My mom used to tell me - she said my kindergarten teacher told her to say it - that if I wanted to tell her a story like that, it was okay, as long as at the end I said 'just kidding' or something similar. I remember very clearly having none of that. It sucked all the fun out of it. I said, 'okay,' and just kept doing it my way. My mom, rather than recognizing me as the lying little brat I most certainly was, took me at my word, and believed my stories from there on out. Because of this, we're constantly running into things like the corn on the cob story where I have to, once again, remind my mother that hardly anything I said to her as a kid had any basis in reality. It's sad. More accurately, in a detached way it's sort of sad. I don't feel it myself at all, because it's how my reality has always been, and hard as I try, I can't feel anything wrong about it, even though I can recognize it objectively as something that's probably sad for her. Strange.

So it might be a symptom of Munchausen syndrome to suggest that I think I may have had a mild version of Munchausen syndrome during a large part of my childhood, but I'm okay with letting it stand that way. In seventh grade I sprained my ankle playing rugby with the boys, right after I told them they didn't have to be scared of tackling me. The ensuing emergency room-visiting, parent-coddling, crutch-sizing, aircast-wearing, teacher-sympathizing experience made me desperately want to go through it again. I faked it twice more during middle school. I'm not sure if anyone knew up until now that those were fake; now you know. People looked at me in crutches, asked me about them. It was middle school. The only questions I was getting asked regularly otherwise were snide ones from the popular crowd about whether I shaved my legs yet or whether I was anorexic. Getting asked about crutches was a step up. One experience stands out especially vividly for some reason; if you asked me to describe the tile pattern in the bathroom, the molding on the windows, the temperature of the tap water of that day in the bathroom, I'd be able to do it.

I was waiting my turn in line for the sink, leaning and swinging a bit on my crutches. My foot in its air cast rested lightly on the floor without any real weight on it. I actually don't remember if this was the real sprain or one of the fake ones; I sometimes lied so well I even forgot back then. Anyway, I was next in line and the girl washing her hands was a girl who'd made her fair share of fun of me. I was close to her, mere inches away, as the bathroom was tiny, and when she stepped back from the sink, she stepped on - merely brushed, really - my casted foot.

Though I didn't say anything, I must have made a tiny noise, because she turned around to see what she'd stepped on, and when she turned around, her eyes... I'll never forget her eyes. They were dinner plates, alien spaceships, planets. They took up her whole face. For a second, she was speechless, and then she exploded in a string of apologies that must have taken her five minutes to complete. Girls came in and out of the bathroom, the bell rang, girls squealed and ran for their classes, and she was still apologizing. The solar system shriveled and poured into a black hole, never to return, she was still apologizing, etc., etc. I stood frozen. I couldn't extract myself! Everyone who came in, she exclaimed, like she couldn't believe it, 'I stepped on her broken foot! I stepped on her broken foot!' I had no idea what to do with my hands while this was happening. Some mumbled 'it's okay's must have escaped my mouth at some point, but I honestly don't know. I was too mesmerized.

And even though it was supremely uncomfortable and awkward, I have remembered that occurrence right up until the moment I write this. It stands out as something I must have tried to duplicate. It wasn't the first time I had invented an illness (stomach problems in fourth grade to escape the possibility of participating in a fire drill; eventually turned into real stomach problems from anxiety - a dislike of vegetables in first grade to 'see what it felt like to not like something' - a high fever, always, to avoid that horrible clique of fifth-grade girls) but it was the first time I'd done it deliberately knowing what I was going for.

There are things I faked because of my possible-faux-Munchausen-resulting-from-Munchausen syndrome (this circle of logic really is vicious; try thinking about it) that I will never reveal because they are too terrible. Even writing it like that sounds like an excuse - that I wouldn't have done it unless I had had some kind of medical condition. The truth is, I probably would have. Anyone would. Everybody with this 'syndrome' probably has. I hate to go out on a limb I know practically nothing about, but I don't know about this whole 'name a disorder after every slightly undesirable personality trait' thing. People just go through periods where they are selfish, or where they like to be alone, or where they can't sleep for awhile. When there is a biological basis, an observable difference, in the brains of people with these syndromes and the people without, I'd like to read the paper on it. And if there already is, can anyone direct me towards it?

I went into Petco yesterday to wait for Camille to buy catfood. As always in Petco there were two tiny sad cages by the front door with two large sad cats in them who could barely move. And as usual they were both turned so their butts faced the outside. They were probably sick of being poked through the bar by index fingers, maybe even scratched, and then abandoned. Nothing makes me sadder than housecats in cages, for some reason. I mean, I know why it makes me sad but I have no idea when or how it became the saddest thing possible. Formative experiences, I guess. I'm not being very romantic about it. Anyway, if I ever get arrested, it will be because I'll have been an undercover cat-freer for years, sneaking around under the cover of dark, jimmying the locks of pet stores everywhere and lifting the cats out with my special patented upside-down combination neck scratch calming lift.

(This lift is not to be attempted at home; serious scratching could occur, and has, if you don't have the cat at the precise degree of upside-down-ness required.)

Anyway, they'd be set free. I'm not a cat, so I don't know, but I think I'd rather live in the worst free conditions, alleys, scraps, backyards, fighting for territory with other cats, than live in a 2x3 foot cage in a Petco, or anywhere. Those shelters that require adopters to adopt two cats at once, that is so, so stupid. I haven't adopted cats from those shelters because of that rule. Almost everyone I know has chosen not to adopt cats from those shelters because of that rule. Sometimes you just can't adopt two cats. How can shelters set guidelines on adoption that result in less cats being adopted and more cats being put to death, and justify it at all?

Those would be released too. If I ever found out where Death Row for cats was, I'd be an outlaw immediately, probably so recklessly that I'd be caught. That breaking news that PETA was killing animals in the back of their van right outside animal shelters after they'd promise to make a 'good-faith effort' to find them homes severed any tenuous moral ties I ever had to PETA. I'm not sure how anything could be more antithetical to anything. Anger makes me not articulate.

Anyway, one of the cats, the one in the bottom cage, had his neck craned the tiniest bit so he could see out, but it wasn't immediately obvious that he was. I started to reach my finger out so he could smell it, but stopped. I read the sign on the outside of the cage, written, as always, in pleading language with smiley faces and cat cartoons and 'Adopt Me!' balloons all over it. Name: Arthur. Sex: Male, Spayed. Age: 4.5. Description: Sweet as can be!

Arthur peered at me over his shoulder, looking wary. I stood still, peering back. Unconsciously, I shuffled one of my feet, and, suddenly on guard, Arthur circled, crouched by the door of his cage, and sat tense and facing me, his nose between the bars. I shuffled again, and realized what had him so interested... the drawstrings on my cargo pants.

For the rest of the time I was waiting I walked back and forth, danced, dragged, in front of his cage, and the whole time he was entranced. I made sure not to let him know I was looking at him. I just let him, in his mind, stalk that mouse, that rabbit, that bug, around trees and under fences and through stalks of corn, his paws eventually batting through the bars of the cage, and, finally, let him catch it, bring it up onto the metal floor of his prison and gnaw a hole right through. He had such a grip on it that when Camille was finished and came to get me so that we could go, I had to kneel down and disentangle it from his claws, extended all the way out as they were. As I was replacing it around my ankle, my face level with his, he meowed at me. In my mind I had a flash of lifting him out of the cage, bringing him to the counter, adopting him, taking him home, hiding him from my landlord, letting him out to be friends with the cats from the other building and chase real mice, real bugs. It was a quick flash. My body killed it by walking out. But if I had endless money and endless time I would buy a giant fenced in mansion and as many cats as I could love.

I remember the singular, frightening concentration of a three day juice fast. Food. Food. Foodfoodfoodfood. Juice ceases to be food. Juice ceases to be satisfying or nutritional, it ceases even to seem to have mass, except of course when it forces me to run to the bathroom to pee thirty times a day. It has mass on its way out. But inside, it's nothing. Less than nothing. I take a deep breath the second morning and my stomach stays the same. There is nothing to pooch it out. The air is tiny enough by itself, without any food, that it makes no difference in what it looks like. This makes me feel as though I am suffocating.

It is just like me, I think, to be so dramatic about three days of juice when this is in no way life threatening and millions of people are suffering much worse as I write. It is just like me, but it does make sense, when you think about it, because one's own suffocating is immediate and the rest of the world's suffering, even if it were every single other human being on the planet, is not. To consider it makes me feel redundant and selfish. Anyone else would feel this way, or they should, but it's impossible to change.

Last time I did this I was still in school. I took my container of grape juice up to the anthropology lounge, along with Nick, his container of grape juice, and things to play hangman with. In the kitchen, someone was microwaving some kind of frozen Italian dinner. I say this now, 'some kind', but back then, I knew all its ingredients from the instant I stepped into the stairwell. Butter, parmesan, tomatoes, basil, pepper, all thick as mustard gas in the stairwell. It almost laid me out along the banister. I would have punched the woman in in the kitchen in the face for her lunch. One bite of her lunch, even. Her permission to sit in the hallway and smell it as she microwaved it until it sizzled and burned.

Normally, I hate frozen dinners. I spent my last two years of high school eating potato chips, grapes, and frozen dinnners, and the smell of a Lean Cuisine still takes away my appetite instantly. I never thought I'd find an exception, but apparently all it takes is about 40 hours of grape juice and lemonade. How long would it take for me to find celery, my taste nemesis, mouthwatering? 1 day of nothing? Less?

Probably less before I became so singularly minded that I couldn't concentrate on anything else. It's been about 12 hours now and this entry speaks for itself.