Happy birthday, Sarah and John!

Hope they were good ones.

My first friend to die

The Internet is a strange place, full of everything and nothing, like an image of the tombstone of my first friend to die:

Aislinn was a friend of mine from high school. She was brilliant but never applied herself, not seeing the value of high school. She was insanely smart, articulate, funny, but would sabotage herself by coming to school high and so on. She never even took the SATs, as I recall.

When I was in college, she sort of snapped herself out of it — everyone else going off to college has that effect on a lot of folks — and proudly told me in the fall of 1989 that she was attending community college classes at Northern Virginia Community College and was planning on transfering to James Madison University for the next school year.

A week or two before Virginia Tech’s 1990 spring break, she collapsed in her parents’ kitchen, spilling milk all over the floor. It turned out she had a brain tumor the size of a tennis ball. She kept up a good attitude, and rediscovered her Catholicism in a big way.

She died that fall. Because I was always moving to a new place each year (sometimes each semester), and it was in the days before cell phones and e-mail addresses, our mutual friends couldn’t find me and tell me, I didn’t hear she had died until the spring of 1991. I remember breaking down in a movie theater when Macaulay Culkin got stung to death by bees; I hadn’t had any real release prior to then, and became a basket case in the theater. (The film was no great loss, as I recall. Slim pickings in Blacksburg back then.)

When Aislinn turned 18 following our high school graduation, I brought her multiple grocery store flower bouquets merged into one as my gift. The normally tough Aislinn sort of freaked out at this: Somehow, she had managed to go 18 years without flowers.

I like to think that, if she was alive today, Aislinn would be Queen of the World by now.

And in a completely different mode, here’s a picture of a friend of mine from high school/college, Wendy Wickham, holding up a fish:

Everything and nothing, see?

Happy birthday, Jenn!

Figure out what you want to eat for dinner.

San Diego Zoo videos

Saturday, we went to the world-famous San Diego Zoo. Here are an excessive number of YouTube videos shot with the non-zooming videocamera on my Treo. They’re all shot silently, so you can watch these at work.

That little smudge up there? A koala.

Flamingos apparently seem exotic in California. (They also had a lot of ordinary ducks, which seems to be the “let’s build a wall around animals who had wandered onto the property” school of zoo design.)

A monkey does … well, not much.

Turtles. Given that this is the most interesting video of the bunch, I’m thinking that the aquarium might be a better choice for camera phone videography than the zoo. (Yes, it’s the most interesting video of the bunch. Sorry.)

A tiger licks the bloody remains of a toddler off the ceiling of his enclosure.

The Alaskan brown bear is famously not interested in becoming a star.

A little red boar.

This once-thought-to-be-extinct peccary was one of my favorite things at the zoo.

A goat in the petting zoo portion of the San Diego Zoo. He’s just happy he’s not getting slapped around by little kids the way the rabbits are.

And finally, the meerkat portion of our program. Enjoy.

There was an old lady with sarcoidosis who swallowed a fly

So, because my joints swell up because of the granulomas formed by my wacky immune system due to sarcoidosis, I take anti-inflammatories so that I can survive the effective equivalent of serious arthritis.

But because consistent use of heavy-duty anti-inflammatories like asprin or anything else really tears up your stomach, giving serious heartburn and, ultimately, more serious stomach problems.

So to deal with that, I have to take a heavy duty anti-heartburn medication daily. (It’s an all-in-one multi-pill package of both 1000 milligrams of the medicine in Aleve and Prevacid.)

Now, because of that, a recent study says that my body isn’t absorbing calcium properly (ironically, I once got a kidney stone — which I don’t recommend — from having too much calcium). So, if I’m really lucky, I can break a hip before I’m 40.

I know an old lady who swallowed a cat. Think of that, to swallow a cat!
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird, she swallowed the bird to catch the spider
that wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.

She swallowed the spider to catch the fly. I don’t know why she swallowed the fly.

Perhaps she’ll die.

Time to add calcium supplements to the daily regimen.