I Am Who IM

xian: boo hoo – i feel crummy
b: i’m sorry, baby–did you get your medication?
xian: yes, finally, and the bleach
xian: how are you feeling?
b: are you in for the day now?
xian: i think so, yes.
xian: just keeping up with my work will keep me busy at least till you get home
b: I’m feeling ok. I took some advil this morning so the scratchy eye feeling is muted and drip is minimal. I don’t really feel sick–just the usual sinus effect
xian: yeah, i think when the advil and the antihistamine kick in i may feel much better. i felt ok yesterday when medicated
xian: “First, I saw Halle Berry try to cry at the Oscars. For the longest time, I could not put my finger on why she looked so weird emoting up there on the podium. But then I realized that her forehead and eyebrows did not seem to be folding or crinkling one bit despite her tears. And that’s when it hit me: Botox. “
b: would someone so young really use Botox?
b: I just saw a snippet of an article in yesterday’s Chron (Bay Area section) that was about the murder of a jazz percussionist “who accompanied jazz greats and jammed with members of the
xian: yeah, i heard about that guy, strange name, somethingsphere?
xian: i know he jammed with grisman, and maybe mickey hart?
b: Grateful Dead…” but couldn’t see the rest of the article
b: you don’t know who it was?
xian: there must be 10,000 musicians in the bay area and the u.s. who “jammed with members of the grateful dead” at some point in the last 35 years
xian: his name wasn’t familiar to me, but i saw it on my mailing lists (MPs, Zero list) and on the Well (posted by silberman)
b: i thought it might be just a hook for the article
xian: well, i think it’s like what jumps out from the resume or the friend talking as the journalist is taking notes, and then what is considered newsworthy
xian: like the local angle
xian: or that old far side cartoon where a bird newscaster announces that a plane crashed and details the number of birds that were killed (sucked into the engine)
b: i just wrote a note to EB about trying to get a date sometime in early May–does she know about the layoff?
xian: it’s not much of a hook, though, and it may not be fair to the guy’s memory. do you want to see airto’s obit start with the fact that he jammed with the Dead?
xian: i think it told her at her opening?
xian: it=O
xian: O=I
b: it may depend on what newspaper is running the article–around here the hook is always Dead
xian: hey, i just invented a cyclops smiley by mistake O=|
xian: yeah, and it’s sort of like a false positive sometimes
xian: my eye can pick out the word grateful from anywhere on a page
xian: and when i was writing my Internet books, i sometimes misread the word internment
xian: my eustachian tubes are still plugged but the antihistamine has dried me up (water…), and the advil has elevated my mood somehow.
b: good ol’ mood enhancers
xian: is advil supposed to do that?
xian: or maybe antiinflammatory has happy as a side effect?
b: actually, i find that advil depresses me over time (and is a mild soporific so good for bedtime)
b: decongestant is the upper
b: like chili mole
xian: but i took the decongestant hours ago and by itself it did not bring me up!
xian: also, talking to dr. whitmore last time i was sick?
b: i just noticed that the dead guy lived in San Leandro–remind me we never want to live there
xian: she made it clear to me that you can oversimplify what each of these drugs do. like the decongestant does not just open the nasal passages and the antihistamine does not just stop the runny nose, itchiness, and other sympotms…
xian: i don’t even like st. leander
b: who he?
b: then there’s oly ander
xian: no idea but hte name leander is weakthe decongestant also stops the runny nose, i guess because fewer white blood cells needed to deal with the inflamamtion? anyway, my point is it’s all yin/yangily interswirled
xian: and oh! atlanta, by little feat, i say yea, hey, yeah at – lan -ta got to dooby dooby do