Food, and Tunes

New food for today: honeydew melon.

Funny, I've been very fruit-phobic since I got sick, but honeydew is a kind of odd comfort food for me. After the brain tumor, my tongue was affected for a couple of months, and most foods didn't taste their normal taste to me. One of the few things that did was honeydew, and it was so cold and refreshing; I would eat it all the time. But I've also heard that if you have hay fever -- as I do -- avoid honeydew during hay fever season, because it's part of the ragweed family of plants and will make you worse. Anyway, I'm safe, I guess, given the weather. I also just put together a jello lime pie, but that's for later.

Today is supposedly the first day of a week of warm weather, and the temperature is actually about 42, but it's still windy and damn cold. It's getting into the fifties this week, but there's rain a-comin' on Tuesday.

Okay, so I have a bitty problem, and I'm curious to know if anyone has thoughts on it. I finally got around to my first stage of sorting papers for taxes today, which means I threw out all kinds of stuff that I kept for no reason, put aside other stuff to shred, and now I have only a very small pile to sort for tax stuff. Buried in the pile -- okay, it was in a big paper shopping bag -- were Christmas cards from people at work.

Here's what happened. On the last day of school before Christmas break, someone came by and dropped off a manila envelope for me of school mail, including paycheck stubs, that had been accumulating. I took out the paystubs, and somehow managed to keep bills paid while I was sick (No "Oh, you're so sick; should I pay the bills or something?" but that's another complaint) and then threw the other stuff on top of the bag and went back to bed to collapse. Anything that was not super-urgent got thrown in the bag, until today, because I forgot all that stuff was there.

I picked up the half-dozen or so cards today, and noticed that one of them was thick. I thought, okay, maybe someone sent out hand-made cards, I don't know; I opened it, and there was a $25 iTunes card, and note from the SCM.

Now, here's my dilemma. Ordinarily, each year, we library folk exchange holiday gifts among each other. I wasn't there this year, and by the time I came back, it seemed awkward to bring it up, although I had -- have -- a bag in my living room of wrapped gifts for them all. Neither Media Girl or the Secretary brought it up, either. We always give these gifts in person, as in, I wasn't there so there was no gift giving. (I'm sure the other three of them gave each other gifts, which is as it should be; I just wasn't a part of it this year because I was lying in bed like a limp rag.)

So now, this is strange. If he had said to me on my first day back, "Oh, by the way, did you get the iTunes card?" I would have found it, thanked him, and brought in my gift for him. He didn't, because I know him, and he doesn't care if I got it. He only cares that it was on his list of tasks to do -- to give it to me -- and he did it. This is how he operates. He cannot bear to have even the most minor task hanging over him; if it exists, it must be done now.

But I think it's also awkward for me to say now, in March, "Oh, I just went through my mail from December; thanks for the gift."

What I'd really like to say is Hey, idiot, we give our gifts in person, or at the very least, we indicate that we've given a gift, and we provide the receiver the opportunity to reciprocate. He does know how sick I was and that I wasn't reading or doing anything except lying there with the TV on. Okay, I wouldn't call him an idiot to his face, but our relationship is such that I do sometimes have to correct his social blunders, the way a sister would. (If you tell him a secret, you also have to remind him not to repeat it in the faculty room. He's like an 8 year old.)

Say something or let it go?


WATCHING PROJECT RUNWAY MARATHON :: ENTRY #1691