Wednesday, September 1, 2010

You Probably Shouldn't Bother Reading This, Y'all

Right now I am sick and my nose is alternately stuffy and runny and all I really feel like doing is sitting around and whining every few seconds. Scarlett refused to let me lay down and take a nap because she wanted to go to the store and she kept insisting that we had to go right now and she was all, "I have my shoes on, Mom" and I was like, "Uuuuunnnh" because that's kind of like what my whining sounds like. Eventually I got tired of her badgering me and we went to the goddamn store even though I really could have laid down and slept straight through until morning.

Of course today was going to be the day that I really buckled down and got started on my YA novel instead of just endlessly planning it because you can't get a million-dollar advance from ten pages of character summaries and plot points, you actually have to have a manuscript which means I have to actually write something. But now I'm feeling like those people in the Claritin commercials before they take the Claritin and get magically un-fogged and my mouth is hanging open because that's the best way for me to breathe and really, mouth-breathers can't possibly write best-selling manuscripts.

I remember when I got braces the orthodontist was all flabbergasted because my teeth didn't touch together in the back of my mouth and they were like "How do you chew?" and I was thinking "With my mouth" but I would never have said that out loud because I don't say much of anything out loud but especially not something that might be construed as either stupid or rude (but especially stupid) because that's one of my biggest fears.

But I digress. They slapped some braces on me and one of the things they did was give me a palate spreader which was this weird little box on the roof of my mouth and every day I would put a long, thin "key" in it and "turn" it once so that the top of my mouth would grow to be the same width as the bottom of my mouth. And I was used to having a lot more room in my mouth because of the whole teeth-not-touching-in-the-back thing so for like a month after they put it in I would have these moments where I suddenly realized I had been walking around all day with my mouth hanging open like a total freak. As if seventh grade isn't hard enough on a painfully shy nerd-girl with glasses and braces.

So I was going somewhere with this post (at least I think I was) but now I've started thinking about mouth-breathing and chapped lips (because the two always go together, natch) and I can't really remember what the hell I was going to say because I'm pre-Claritin clear, which is to say way foggy, and I should really probably take another dose of DayQuil and crash so that I can get up and go to work tomorrow.

Okay, yeah, that's definitely what I'm going to do. This post is probably completely pointless and should not be read. But that's the sort of thing you should warn people about before they read it and I'm too lazy to go back and put a warning at the top. Plus I totally just tried to plug my laptop power cord into the network cable jack. I told y'all, I'm foggy.