Lately I’ve been feeling more sick than healthy—and it’s made me a little cranky. In fact, I was in full pout mode, which is bad news for my business partner Chad, who must go nuts gauging my crazy meter.
On a recent trip to The Standard to grab a bite to eat and talk business, he was doing his best to snap me out of my funk.
But I just stared vacantly out the car window as I self-diagnosed my symptoms, coming to the conclusion that I’d contracted an unknown disease from an improperly chlorinated pool and would surely lose a limb at any moment.
More likely, though, is that the culprit was improperly cooked food or some strange critter in my salad. Tragic.
(Unless, of course, it makes me skinnier in time for summer—sick, I know.) But what if this happened to me months ago? There’d be no way to track it.
Silly me. I’ve been going about life as if absolutely nothing was wrong. Clearly, I’d soon reach a juncture when the parasite would take over my body and suck the life out of me.
“I could go any day now,” I thought as I sat at The Standard, envisioning myself passing out face-first in my hummus platter—pita bread points inadvertently arranged in the form of devil horns.
I could tell that I was starting to test Chad’s patience as I switched from a forlorn gaze out the window to a preoccupation with my BlackBerry. I added an intermittent sigh to my overly dramatic pout, all of which left me in no mood to talk business.
What was the point of it all? Instead, I channeled Woody Allen and said, “I need to find a parasite specialist ASAP. or we’ll be talking funeral arrangements.
” Then my eye caught an e-mail from my friend Kate emblazoned with the subject line: OMG.
I was afraid to open it. What if she discovered that the West Nile virus was running rampant in the Old Fourth Ward?
Why didn’t she call instead? She knows I have a thing for sitting outside. I checked my skin for mosquito bites and then began to itch all over before I remembered her e-mail languishing on my BlackBerry.
It read:
“I just had to share this with someone … so last night Matt and I grilled out on our patio, hung out, drank wine and listened to CDs on our fabulous outdoor speakers hooked into our entertainment center. Anyway, fast-forward to today. About an hour ago, I was flipping through the channels and was mesmerized, for some unknown reason, by ‘Dr.
Phil.’ I thought, ‘Well, no one has to know’ and I watched the entire show.
Then I decided to let the dogs out.
I opened the door and discovered that the outdoor speakers were blasting the neighborhood with Dr. Phil’s Texan drawl. Turns out some moron forgot to turn the volume off last night.
So not only did my neighbors find out about me and Dr. Phil today, they apparently listened to the sounds of ‘House on Haunted Hill’ late last night. The blood-curdling screams must have scared the s**t out of them.
It's pretty awesome really, or is it just pathetic? I can't decide ..
.”
Imagining Dr. Phil’s voice booming across lawns everywhere—like the voice of God—completely caught me off-guard and I burst into a guffaw so loud that I almost peed my pants a little bit.
I read the e-mail to Chad and then acted out several scenes of Kate’s unsuspecting neighbors trying to escape the pop-psychology rhetoric of the daytime gabber. Guess it’s a blessing it wasn’t porn, right?
My spirits were instantly lifted and I decided to save the “OMG” e-mail for the next time I was feeling low.
And, it turns out, I do not have a parasite lodged in my brain, it’s just a sinus infection. Go figure.
When not attending Atlanta's hottest parties, tracking down celebs or shopping for shoes, Caren West runs her own PR firm.
E-mail her at .
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