Clearly, it is just a myth that if you get enough sleep, eat a healthy diet, get daily exercise and think noble thoughts, you will wake up each morning at the crack of dawn, bound out of bed and face the new day with a smile and a toned pelvic floor.

Not that I'd know anything about that. My lifestyle runs a bit more to the, I don't know, pre-suicidal.

I suffer a sweaty, fitful night's sleep, wake up at the crack of noon, carb-load like I am going to run the fucking Boston marathon, buy new underwear each month to avoid the exertion of going downstairs to the washing machine, and keep my head filled with bitter, poisonous envy of the good fortune of anyone I know.

Still, this lifestyle is not as awesome as you'd think. I wake up every morning with a headache and lurch to the bathroom to spit out my bite guard before I gag on it. I chew down my Prozac with an Advil, lurch to the kitchen to hit the "on" button on the coffee maker, lurch back to the bathroom to measure my facial moles and recalculate the day of my death from melanoma, remember that I did not put coffee or water into the machine last night, lurch quickly back to the kitchen to turn off the coffee maker before I burn the empty carafe (again), eat one of the bajillion things I will regret eating that day, bask in self-loathing and then return to the computer to remind myself that I am a hack and nobody thinks I am funny.

Maybe I should get more fiber. I seem to have lost my joie de vivre.

I'm in a bad way. You see, there is a slight possibility of good news.

Living here on the bottom, it's pretty hard to hurt yourself when you fall down a few notches. Disappointment? Yeah, I'm already there. Rejection? Got it. Bad news? Puhleese. Like I know from anything else in this veil of tears. Allowing myself to rise up, to even glimpse the shiny underbelly of hope, well, that is just asking for trouble. I come from a people who knows that unexpected news is never good. I mean, after the third time Nazi's show up uninvited to your door and it's NOT because they are bringing you a bundt cake to welcome you to the neighborhood, well, you learn to hide behind the bookcase.

So I just live behind the bookcase now and rarely come out unless the cake thing is an absolute  certainty.

Claire said to me, "you would rather fail immediately than ever wait and have a chance at success?"

I love how Claire gets me.  And, duh.  Nazis rarely come to the doors of my people with the sole (or even adjunct) intention of bringing cake. Well, maybe German chocolate cake. Which, I bet, they would force us to watch them eat and not offer us any. Those sick fucks. Thank God we defeated them.

Great. Now I want cake.