the mono.

Yet again, blogging has been foiled by life's little quirks. This time the quirk came in the form of mononucleosis.

Yeah. That's right. At 23, I was afflicted with the disease usually reserved for hormone-crazed 16 year olds.

It's been a rough five weeks. It started with some scariness -- namely involving the doctor's being completely baffled by some impressively active lymph nodes in my groin. A week off work for doctor's visits. A six-hour stint at Suburban Hospital, which included a massive amount of blood drawn, and a CT scan. And ta-da! I have mono.

Really, I'd much rather have mono than any of the alternatives that come with swollen lymph nodes. But still. I'd much rather be healthy, too.

Now, five weeks later, I've almost fully recovered. Still waiting for my liver to cool it and catch up with the rest of my body. And until then, I'm teatotaling it, and minimizing any especially active activities (how's that for redundancy?).

Anyone who's read my blog before knows that I typically like to find a lesson, or five, in the things that I encounter and experience. So here are my lessons, in convenient list form, in no particular order:

01. When you get sick, and you don't know what's wrong, people worry about you. It's an incredibly wonderful feeling to know that there are people who truly care about your well-being and what happens to. I'm not talking about doctors and surgeons, I'm talking about friends and family. I'm so amazingly lucky to have parents close by, and fabulous friends and a boyfriend on-call who would check in daily for updates.

02. Health insurance is a god send. This experience has opened my eyes to just how essential it is to be able to just hand over your card, pay your co-pay and get the care you need. Thankfully, my experience ended in mono, but had it not, I would be even more thankful for health insurance. I cannot imagine life without it, and I'm really glad our government is working toward making it available to everyone. Politics aside, no one should have to worry about getting the care they need.

03. Mono sucks. It's a terrible, rotten, miserable virus. It knocked me on my ass. And it was absolutely amazing to me how little energy I had.

04. Puzzles are awesome. My friend sent me a care package full of "sick activities". A puzzle, coloring book, crayons, play dough. Yeah. I have great friends.

05. Knowing your limits is essential. I've never thought I had a problem listening to my body and knowing my limits. I've always been pretty in tune. But having mono has made me that much more aware.

06. Being healthy is a god send. I have so much respect and admiration for people who grapple with illness their whole lives. It sucks. And I'm sorry. I know I just had mono, but I feel that much more lucky that in a few weeks, I'll be back to normal and feel better. I wish everyone had that luxury.

OK, so I think that's it. I'm sure there are other things that I've learned/realized, but I can't think of them now. Other than the mono, things are going pretty well. Wednesday Night Dinners have continued, and now include another friend who is dead-set on blogging about it. So I'll post about that as soon as it happens.

I know I've fallen off this blogging wagon, and I'm struggling to get back on. So if you're still reading, thanks. And if not, I don't blame you.

b

rain.

It's raining. Again. Literally, for like the fifth or sixth time this week, and it's only Thursday.

Not only am I getting very, very tired of the rain, but I am also beginning to live in perpetual fear of it when it rains in the morning. I have an uncanny, Pavlovian response where my stomach clenches and my mind begins to race, It has eight days to learn how NOT to do this.

You see, Elon means "oak" in Hebrew, and so our lives here are tree themed. In fact, they pretty much revolve around trees. When you come to Elon, you get an acorn. When you graduate, you get an oak sapling to symbolize your maturity and growth. When you get old and start donating a lot of money, you join the Order of the Oak. Everything is acorn, squirrels (because they live in trees) and oaks. They're everywhere. And so, we hold our graduation ceremonies under those trees from which Elon derived its name and its essence.

Herein lies the source of my anxiety. It has not rained for graduation in 10 years. WHERE are those trees when I need to knock on them!! In fact, it hadn't rained on graduation for 25 years before that. Yeah, you read that right. We went 25 years, then one big, disastrous ceremony, which involved soaked grandmas, running makeup and then a fire alarm (yeah.) and now have gone 10 more. Needless to say, I'm absolutely TERRIFIED.

It sounds petty, but I want my Elon graduation. I'll still be an Elon graduate if I have to (knock on that oak again...) walk across the stage in Alumni Gym, but I won't have had the true Elon experience of sitting under those trees like I did four years ago.

So please. Find any wood, preferably oak, in your house and knock on it at least once or twice a day for me and all my fellow acorns who just want a sunny morning on May 23.

Thank you.

a jaunty tilt

I think a little back story is necessary... Yesterday evening, I was enjoy a nice cold beverage as I did some work. I then proceeded to spill half of said beverage, which contained sugar (it was crystal light), on my laptop keyboard.

Freaking out, I quickly mopped it all up, laughing happily in the wonder and good fortune that my keyboard should function at all. It had started to dry when I realized there was a greater problem.

My keys are sticking. Not just a little oops, here or there. We're talking like intense, it's hard to push them down, sticking.

So I get some water, a paper towel, a cotton ball and a Q-tip. All manner of sizes of wiping materials, I wasn't sure what I was going to need, you see. And I start cleaning the top of the computer, thinking that the problem is that the sides are sticking to the base board. But I don't think I can really get at the source, because my keys aren't the kind that come off. At least not that I've figured out. This generally solves some of the problem, but they're definitely still sticky. Ugh.

Fast forward to today, 5 p.m. after consulting with my computer savvy friend, I've been told that the keys can come off, but to remove them at my own risk, as some times they can be very tricky to get back on. All I heard is that they come off. They come off!!

Anyone who knows me knows that if there's the possibility of making something cleaner than it is at the moment, I will take it. I like things clean, I like things not-sticky. And so darn it, if I can make this keyboard not sticky, you better believe I'm going to try.

A quick Google search explains ways of cleaning keyboards without removing keys... yeah yeah yeah. Nope. I scroll down to the good part, "How to clean keyboard after removing keys." Jackpot.

I turn off the computer, unplug it and take out the battery. I'm really not looking to be electrocuted, especially with my roommate in L.A. and no one around to hear me scream... After I flip it back over, I start scanning for keys that are basically unused, something that if I can't for some reason reattach, it's not the end of the world. It's like using whatever new cleaning product on a spot behind the door. It's the guinea pig. The test subject, as it were.

Behold, the "Application Key." I didn't even know that's what it was called, I had to look it up. Anyway, I had read that the best way to get the little buggers off was to use a small screwdriver. Enter, my finger.

So I start working at it and realize that there are these two little plastic thingies that toggle together, almost like a seesaw, it's called the key retainer. (that website was useless, btw.) And it hooks in to the baseboard and the key top. Anyway, the key top just snaps off.

Awesome. This is easy. I can do this.

[Note to reader, next time I say that, slap me.]

I pull off the application key and lo and behold. Gross. There is so much crap on my keyboard! I'm appalled and decide it's time to really clean this sucker. I'm going to go row by row, pull off my keys and make it sparkle.

I pop the application key back on, and start with Q, W, E, R, T and Y. All come off and go back on with ease. And so I start with A, S, D, F, G and H. I get the first five off and on with no problem, and then there's H. It figures it should be H, because I then entered keyboard hell.

The key retainer came off with the H. Yeah, that's right. It came right off. Um. Oh. My. Gosh.

Insert panicked expletive here.

And so I pull off Y, to make space, and start trying to slide the retainer back into it's four metal prong-like holders.

It will not go.

I try, and I try and I try. I can get the bottom, or the two prongs closest to me to go in, but the top prong has some how expanded since leaving its home. It's a lot like that scene from Friends when Ross wears the leather pants and he goes to the bathroom, takes them off, and his legs swell and he can't get them back on.... but yeah, this is plastic. This should work. But no.

So, I take the little retainer apart. Bad idea. Ten minutes later and I finally get it back together. And I try to shove it in again. And again and again.

You get to a point, where you begin to understand that trying is just not going to work anymore.

At this point I'm frantic. I have broken my keyboard. It will not be clean. It will not be sparkly. It will not be not-sticky. If I can't use my H key. It does not matter.

And so. Resigned to the fact that I'm just going to have to make due, I shove the bottom prongs into their holders and hold my breath as I snap the H back into place. It goes. Breath out. I turn the computer on, and the H works. It now sits at a jaunty tilt and my finger catches on it occasionally on the way back up. But, it works, and that's really all that matters right now.

And so, children, the moral of story is this: If your keyboard works, and it's just a little sticky, it's OK. Leave it alone. Or you'll end up with a tilted H key like me and a computer keyboard that is still sticky.

the saga continues

"Have a seat," they always say, "and let us take a look at what we've got going on here."

They lean the chair back and tell you to open wide. They stick the little mirrored circle in your mouth to take a closer look. They're faces scrunch as they peer into an abyss littered with white stalactites.

"Hmm, OK, well we've got a little problem here."

That's the way it has always seemed to go for me. Genetics blessed me with a pretty rotten set of teeth. They're not actually rotten, just in the wrong places. I've been to orthodontists, dentists and oral surgeons since I was about 11 years old. And it hasn't ended yet.

My tally: Two rounds of braces totaling 5 years, 13 tooth extractions including both front teeth and one adult tooth, and a round of oral surgery to expose a tooth on its side so it could be righted by braces. Two years from now, we'll be able to add two additional extractions, another set of braces and another bout of oral surgery to that list.

I'm not complaining, well, maybe I am a little bit, but I just find it completely insane that some kids never even wear braces and I've dealt with all this. Perhaps orthodontia needs kids like me to keep them in business. For every braceless face, there's the girl with a lifetime subscription.

I'm currently facing another four months of braces at the fabulous age of 22. These orthodontic nightmares will most likely accompany me through my job search and probably into the work place. I'm not exactly vain, sure I wax my eyebrows and I've had my nails done, but I like to look nice, and I think first impressions are really important. I look somewhere between 16 and 18 anyway, add braces and I'm done for.

But it's inevitable. It has to be done. As I was whining to my friend yesterday he told me, take a few days, be pissed off about it and then move on. He's always been good at stuff like that -- for the most part he knows how to let things slide off of him. I don't see him wearing braces at 22, but you know.

So here they come. Ready or not. The self-esteem will probably take a momentary hit, but I'm pretty sure this is just another lesson in endurance. It's about learning to live with what's put in front of me. I've been thinking a lot about fate recently -- chock it up to the fact that I'm graduating, but I actually think about it a lot. Maybe we're meant to endure certain hardships, they help us grow, they help us learn, they shape who we are.

I know, I know. They're just braces. But to me, they're a little more than that. I know it could always be worse. I know that, believe me, I know that. But I can't help but feel a little duped by my gene pool. To me, they're just another notch on a time line of annoyance in a mouth that's always been a problem. The saga continues.