Mole`

I was eating a pizza in the bathtub this evening and flipping through the pages of my TIME magazine. I finished the last piece and swished my fingers in the water to clean them off.

Leaning back against my waterproof bathtub pillow, I saw something out of the corner of my eye: A suspicious-looking spot on my right shoulder.

Oh, come ON. My risk of secondary cancer is 75% due to my bone marrow transplant. Melanoma now, huh?

I craned my neck to peer closer at it. The border was well-defined, which was good, but the color was definitely off.

Ever so carefully, I reached over and touched it.

The mole came off on my fingertip.

What the...?

It was a fleck of basil.

As if that wasn't embarrassing enough, I remembered that this wasn't the first time a speck of herb was stuck to my body via bathtub water and subsequently mistaken for terminal illness.

Note to self: Next time, make a sandwich instead.

Sick, sick, sick.

I'm a hot mess. I can hardly keep anything down. I've been in bed almost 2 days now, stomach in crazy pain. Right at the start of my 2-week vacation, too. I just finished my final for school, and now I have to wait 2 weeks for my test score to see if I passed and can go get a job and be gainfully employed.

Epiphany. I bet I'm such a nervous wreck about passing the final that I'm making myself sick. Dammit! And you can't just tell yourself, "Eh, let it go" or "Frankie Say Relax!" Take my mom for instance. If she's upset about something, tell her to "calm down" and the world would have a new nuclear threat to worry about.

My biggest fear is that I don't pass the test.

"So," Mom says. "You take it again. You get 3 tries at it."

You have 48 hours to complete the test. I ended up needing a good 7 or 8 hours of solid work time to do it. I looked up every single multiple-choice answer. I double-checked the spelling on the name of every medical equipment transcribed. I obsessed over comma versus semicolon versus period and what the dictator really intended by their speech pattern.

Yeah, I can take it again if I failed it.

But I don't think I could do a better job. I really don't.

And that's what it's all about - a job. Getting one. Feeling that ever-elusive feeling of self-reliance. I don't get to feel that all that often.

Aw, hell. I guess it's like I always told my grandmother before she died:

It beats the alternative.

General Germless and Sergeant Septic

It's strange that our society greets each other by shaking hands. Our hands are probably the third dirtiest part our bodies, and yet we subject strangers to our germs. If you decline to shake hands, you've effectively destroyed any possibility of friendship/commaraderie with that person.

The military salutes their superiors. Their peers, who knows. Maybe they fist bump, if anything.

I wonder if the Army has lesser rates of communicable diseases among their ranks?

A diary in the Documents folder.

I hit "save as" on the freelance article I was working on. My documents list popped up, seeking verification that the "save as" location was indeed what I wanted.

Instead of confirming and then going on my merry digital way, something caught my eye.

"Leadershipphilosophypaper-KEEP!!!"

I smiled to myself. That was the first paper I wrote for my Masters in Communication and Leadership. It detailed the philosophies I had developed thus far in my educational and professional career (having consisted of a 2-year stint in the drive-through window at Taco Bell). After submitting the assignment for a grade, we were told to keep it because we would be referring back to it in our final theses.

I don't keep things well. I think to myself, "When on Earth will I ever need this again?" and then throw away my passport.

Further down the Desktop Documents list was 9, 10, 11 applications for jobs I never got called for.

There's the 3 novels that are in various stages of completion, all having been rejected by many, many agents.

My housesitter instructions are buried in the list. I've taken to only traveling when my father isn't. He is a great housesitter and doesn't take typed instructions.

They say that social media has become our new diaries, chronicalling our every move online. I think it's more stalkerish, carefully watching, watching, documenting things that are more important to target marketing rather than our life experiences.

If it's conceded that the diary is extinct, I think the word processing "documents" folder is a good substitution. It's a repository that is actually controlled by the user and not a social media interface. Our documents are survivors of the Recycle Bin, evidence of our lives that we not only write down but save time and time again, updating, revamping, and making just a little bit better for the next time we're here.