Attitude

Thanks for the many kind comments on yesterday's post! They cheered me up, and getting my general feelings of disgust off my chest helped as well.

The following falls under the category of "attitude may not be everything, but it can make the difference between a bad situation and an okay situation."

This morning when I woke up, my right eyelid was swollen to the point that I could barely open my eye. "Well," I thought, "there's no point in calling an advice nurse just yet. At this time of the day, they're going to be swamped with calls from businessmen who've inadvertently shaved off their ears and children who've developed purple rashes. I'll be on hold for an hour. For now I'll just put some compresses on the eye, then start chugging water down so I'm hydrated."

With that, I unglued my eye (yep; still ugly!), chugged down some water, and returned to bed. After dreaming about battling aliens whilst wearing my fuzzy blue bathrobe, I went through the usual business of unsuccessfully searching for toilets on the spaceship, then I woke up. Ah. Time to pee and read email.

Email number one was from Quilt National, a response to my submitting one of my portrait quilts to that show. While it opened, I visualized the first sentence, no doubt a politely framed rejection. "We regret to inform you … etc. etc." Not much point in reading it, actually. What I really should do is pry my lazy rump out of bed, shower, and get cracking on submitting the quilt elsewhere.

But - huh - what was this? The email started out with "It is my great pleasure …" What a strange way to word a rejection! Oooooh. It wasn't a rejection. It was something else. A non-rejection. An acceptance barring their deciding the piece isn't worthy when they see it, which could still happen.

With that, the day took on a surreal tinge. Had there been a mistake? Were they going to write back and say that oh, gosh darn those computers, there'd been a little goof with the mailing list? But, no. Evidently not. Evidently not a mistake. I'm still trying to adjust my world view to this turn of events. I'm just me, you know, over in my corner fiddling around with my inks and what-not.

Regardless, it all provided enough of a mood boost to, I guess, prop up my immune system. A couple of hours after getting the email, my eyelid was noticeably less swollen and I felt peppier. Now the eyelid is only a tad puffy. I still look kind of frayed and disreputable around the edges, but I feel like I'm on the mend.

There's a lesson in there somewhere, a lesson I guess many others have already learned: if you feel like hell, find something to be happy about. If counting blessings is too much to ask, then start watching Monty Python movies or play with the Hummel Beanie Babies or whatever it takes.