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columnasty!
For those of you not fortunate enough to live in Somahvul, I will share my recent column from the Somerville News, which happens to be "The most widely read paper in Somerville" (TM)! Take that!
Mortality Is Weird
by Erin S. Judge*
When I was in high school, older folks used to go on and on about how
kids my age had a deluded sense of invincibility. "You kids," they'd
grumble. "You think you're immortal. But you're not!" That was usually
followed by a lecture on personal responsibility. Said lecture might
include the cautionary tale of a teen who took PCP and jumped through
a window or some poor schmuck who neglected to wear his seatbelt and
flew through his windshield faster than a teen on PCP. These
glass-shattering tales were supposed to prompt us to be more careful
by reminding us that we were not as invincible as we so unanimously
believed.
I never understood this blanket accusation. Maybe that's because I'm a
hypochondriac with anxiety disorder who was raised in the city on
tales of homicide and random violence. By the time I was five, I
believed that child abduction was so common that I assumed it was my
inevitable destiny, so I practiced for it by escaping from improvised
handcuffs and trying to imagine acclimating myself to a new life with
my captor family. I also practiced dying. I would lie flat on
something that wasn't my bed – preferably a coffee table or some other
elevated flat surface – and try to erase all my thoughts. Being dead
turned out to be a lot harder than I expected.
Despite - or perhaps because of - this overdeveloped sense of my own
mortality, when my doctor recently told me I had to go get some tests
on my heart, I was a teensy bit spooked.
During my regular check-up, my doctor noticed that my heartbeat was a
bit wacky (much like the rest of me). She ran an electrocardiogram
right there in the office, and it revealed some PVCs. In layman's
terms, my heart was totally wigging
out, yo. For safety's sake, she decided to refer me to a cardiologist.
I had a lot of time to think between my initial check-up and my
subsequent visit with the heart specialist, the vast majority of which
was spent in waiting rooms. I wondered what it would be like to deal
with serious heart disease in my early twenties, when I'm supposed to
be focused exclusively on cultivating a taste for hip music and being
different from my parents. After the second test, I tried to put it
out of my mind, but I began noticing every errant rhythm in my heart
like an irritated band conductor with a malfunctioning metronome.
Six long, neurotic weeks after my appointment with the cardiologist,
the test results finally came back and...my heart is normal! It's such
a huge relief -- I can finally stop worrying about my health and go
back to worrying about global warming, West Nile viurs, and whether or
not I sound like my mother.
I've decided to celebrate my healthy heart by doing the following:
1) Taking up smoking.
2) Embracing a new, sedentary lifestyle.
3) Abandoning vegetarianism.
4) Going on the Atkins diet.
5) Having sex in my office on my desk with my secretary.
I'm planning to do all of this in order. All I need to get started is
a pack of Marlboros and a job with an office. And a secretary.
Preferably a hot secretary.
**My middle initial is not S. I have no idea where the S came from (maybe everybody who writes for the News has to be able to say "Somerville is my middle name!"), but hey, at least now I have a pen name! And it's so creative!
Posted by erinjudge at November 21, 2005 04:20 PM
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