Not cancer

Not cancer. It was just a virus. So completely lame and crazy that there were two months of scariness and a nice scar for a virus that was no big deal. They need to figure out better faster ways of telling if things are cancer. I know too many people who have had fairly major surgery to remove things that turned out not to be cancer. For as advanced as modern medicine is in certain things, there are others that seem so Dark Ages. I have pictures of my brain but the only way to tell what anything unusual is made out of is to chop it open. We can prevent all sorts of diseases but not the common cold. We can save people from Cancer but it usually involves lots of radiation and hair loss and puking and general misery. Too bad I have no interest in pursuing medicine because humanity has so far to go and there are so many useful things waiting to be discovered. Instead, I just want to add to the global overstock of words and books. Laaame.

I'm having a migraine again. This weather may be nice and temperate for a Chicago January but the weird pressure changes (plus general life stress and last night's revelry with E*) do not make my brain very happy.

*E the person, not the illegal substance

some stress, some shopping

I'm in fight or flight mode. Some mixture of adrenaline and fear. Between finding out today if my friend has Cancer and spending last night figuring out that I may very well have more than two years of full-time school ahead of me, it's warranted. But no panicking. At this point, I really don't think it's cancer (does this mean I'm not emotionally prepared if it is?), and I may end up loving school once it's within my interests/life-passions/etc. And they have a science class that involves the aquarium as its lab component. I'm so taking that as soon as I can. It's the history requirements I'm dreading. That's the kind of class I hate most. Hopefully they will be significantly easy enough that I don't have to feel like I'm wasting too much of my time and energy because that makes me really cranky and shut down. But as for this semester, I kind of want to take one class in general fiction, one in playwriting, one in creative non-fiction, and one in journalism. It seems like a lot in the same vein, but if I end up going the magazine journalism path instead of the creative non-fiction path, I need to know that and start it ASAP as it's a program with a shit-ton of requirements I wouldn't otherwise take. They're useful classes for life (copy editing, trade magazine article writing, a grammar class), but if I'm being a more self-indulgent creative non-fiction person, I'm not likely to choose them. Thank goodness I'm being oriented next week so I don't have that long to stress over such decisions.

Yesterday was an extremely successful shopping day with my sister. I got: two sweaters, a pair of undies, a pair of brown boots I can wear with skirts (finally!), and a new grown-up winter coat. Today I will see how many of these things I can wear at once. Maybe not the two sweaters, but everything else is a maybe. Yee-haw.