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I have a close friend named Linda, who is 46 years old and a retired school teacher. She had to retire several years ago due to having contracted a nasty disease called fibromyalgia.
With each passing year, Linda's condition deteriorates further. And the kind of bitterly cold weather we recently had in Southern new England exacerbates her illness a hundredfold, to a point at which Linda often must spend days at a clip in bed. I do what I can to help her out, but sometimes it can really be a pain in the ass for me.
Today, for example, when I got home from the Hartford-area DU gathering, I checked my phone messages and found two from Linda, each about an hour-and-a-half apart. On the first, she sounded really upset and told me that something horrible had happened, and could I please call her as soon as I got home.
Needless to say, I found the message disturbing, particularly because the fibromyalgia has done considerable damage to Linda's legs, causing her to to be prone to falling down and damaging her brittle bones. In fact, that's exactly what happened about a month ago, when Linda went outside to check her mailbox. She slipped on a patch of ice, landed on her hip, and had to crawl back to the house in the snow! As such, when Linda told me that something horrible had happened, I immediately dialed her number.
Turns out, the "horrible thing" involved a homemade CD I had copied for Linda last fall. Today, when she removed the disc from its case to listen to it, the CD slipped out of Linda's hand and dropped to the floor. When Linda bent down to pick it up, her hand slipped and landed on the CD, causing it to slide several inches across the cement floor. This corrupted the disc to a point at which it was no longer playable.
When Linda finished telling me her tale of woe, I replied (after a stunned silence), "You told me something horrible had happened!"
She gasped. "My not being able to hear Billy Storm wasn't horrible?"
I offered to make Linda a fresh copy of the CD and give it to her the next time we saw each other. But I found it really annoying that she had gotten me all worried about what turned out to be nothing more than her having inadvertently damaged a goddamned CD!
I guess with all the time Linda's health forces her to spend both at home and in bed, she has a lot more time than most of us to obsess over unimportant bullshit. I try to be understanding toward her, but sometimes she makes it awfully difficult!
End of rant.
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