Trailer Wife

For a few days, I really thought we'd hit the swine flu jackpot. Just in time for my 4th wedding anniversary, I fell very very ill. Thus, no blogging. No writing. No fun.

But the house has, thankfully, recovered, and the H1N1 hysteria (thank you frantic internet searches) has passed. By some miracle, neither Sam nor Gus got the bug as badly as I did. And, knock on wood, things have returned to normal on Copper Lane.

I have been working like a dog on my first graduate workshop piece, leaving me both exhausted and in varying degrees of panic. It's been more than a year since I was in a college class, and man am I rusty. I am also, as it turns out, shockingly socially awkward. I spent the first class ducked into a corner, speaking to no one, assuming that everyone else (all having been acquainted as new members of the MFA program) were looking in my direction and wondering if the old lady got lost or something. It gave me flashbacks of my first day of tenth grade, which did not help matters. And then, while we were discussing a story by a writer slated to visit Fairbanks this spring, I decided to make a smart, cynical but open-minded, breezy, brilliant comment. Just went I opened my mouth, with all eyes on me, I had one of those half-cough half-sneeze half-throat seizure things, where you have to cough uncontrollably for five or ten minutes, eyes streaming, nose running, gasping for breath. I died. DIED. And then I came back to life and died again of humiliation.

Needles to say, my witty comment was left unsaid. I'm hoping to redeem myself in tomorrow night's class, if I work up the courage to show my face.

More blogging soon.