MIAMI TO COSTA RICA

Pot.

I have a problem.  I need your help.  I've been trying to decide something very big and I can't seem to make a decision:
Should I get a tea pot? 
I've been making a LOT of tea lately and my little glass French press is put to work daily for a few cups of shade-grown and so far I've just boiled the water in an aluminum sauce pot.  But I hear the neighbor's kettle whistling a couple of times every day and I wonder if this might not be a better way to boil my water.  Less splashing onto the counter.  I could leave it filled without worrying about winged creatures and pet-hair.  But every time I get to the moment of truth, the moment where I select a tea-pot/kettle, I hesitate.  Do I really need one?  Will it be better than the pot?  Do I not violate the single use item ban by purchasing something that I'll only use for one purpose? 
I had one in each hand today.  One was steel with a snazzy padded handle and the other was aluminum with a plastic handle.  I put them both back.  I couldn't make a decision.  As I walked out of the store a few minutes later, I considered the possibility that I haven't got nearly enough going on lately.  An epiphany and something I promise to work on.  But, in the meantime, what do you think?  Pot or Tea Pot?

I'll be dead soon.

I have a sinus infection.  According to Dr. Samuel Flikier-Franjo, the otolaryncologist I saw at Cima Hospital, a nasty one too.  He stuck a metal wand, with a camera on it, up my nose and we watched it in full color on a ten inch screen.  Spelunking in my head.  Cool.  He pointed to the gobs of white pus hanging in the glossy pink cavern and told me that I wouldn't need an MRI because it was pretty clear what was going on.  I guess my telling him about the raging fevers, the three weeks of headaches that required Vicodin just to function and the domino-sized blob of green, brown and pink I'd horked up two days earlier weren't enough to assure him.  I was given a scrip for some monster anti-biotic and sent on my way.  I'm very anti-anti-biotics.  Haven't taken one in, like, seven years.  I'm convinced that if I take anti-biotics in the willy-nilly way everyone I know seems to, that one day, I'll come down with some Ebola-Marburg-Hanta-Avian killer flu and no medicine known to man will stop it and I'll die a slow and messy death leaving my darling husband to be cared for by our six-year-old because she's the only one who knows our phone number and address.  My neighbor, whose husband has terrible sinus problems, suggested I see someone when I was on day four of what I'd first thought was a migraine headache.  I don't like doctors and since I wasn't feeling congested at the time, I didn't want to find out that the skull-splitting pain I was having was, in fact, some inoperable brain tumor and I only had a month to live.  Granted, finding out that it was terminal would at least give me a month to write down information that my husband might need and make some of those depressing videos for my kid that you always see the tragic characters in movies making.  As it turns out, not only am I not dying, I should be just dandy in a few days.  My head will stop hurting, the dizziness will go away, the pain in my face will fade, no more chunks of ick, the sexy growl in my voice will leave with the sore throat and I'll be fresh as a daisy again.  Unless I drop dead suddenly from one of the side-effects of the anti-biotic.  I looked it up this morning on the Internet.  Seizures, heart attack, liver failure.  I felt woozy and went back to bed.  After a while I convinced myself that I really didn't feel my liver twitching and I probably wasn't having chest pain and I should just get up and carry on as best I could.  After all, I thought, I wouldn't want anyone to think I was being melodramatic. 

Intelligent design.

So, last week I'm sitting on the back porch of a very nice house in Escazu, waiting for my kid while she took a half-day art camp upstairs with a dozen or so other children.  I'd been reading David Sedaris' When You Are Engulfed in Flames and laughing out loud, occasionally getting stared at by the house-keeper.  It was a really pretty day, the kind that reminds me why I love living here.  It was cool and sunny and there was a breeze and across the valley I could see low-hanging black clouds that assured me I'd been right to bring our rain jackets.  As I was enjoying the view between chapters, I looked across the porch and saw four little pre-Colombian looking clay figures on the wall.  Two were larger than the other two.  I looked closer and noticed that one of each size was obviously male and the other two were, I guess, female.  For some reason I was really struck by what a small, simple difference the addition of external genitalia made.  And then the thought hit me.  What would I do if I had a penis?  I mean, like, if I just woke up from an afternoon nap and, BAM!, there it was, hanging off me - what would I want do first?  That answer came instantly.  I'd want to stick it somewhere.  Immediately.  Over and over and on and on.  No, wait, that's not what I'd do FIRST.  What I'd do first is try to see if I could, ya know, get it in my mouth.  That's when I realized that if men could actually do that, if they could actually service themselves without ever involving anyone else, well, we would never have left caves.  Hell, the species would have died out.  Maybe that's why we have a spinal column?  Or maybe that's why we have enough vertebrae to keep us from too much self-service?  Oh, crap.  Could that possibly mean that there is 'intelligent design'?  Could my atheism be a mistake?  Could there be some controlling power in the universe?  But then, I remembered that men, just like the little 'male' terra cotta guys on the wall, have nipples and until someone can give me a satisfactory explanation for those, I'm sticking to evolution.  Heck, for all we know, there were earlier versions of humans with no skeleton and that's why there's no record.  They just died out because they actually could reach their penis with their lips and never managed to reproduce.

In a good mood. Had to put this up:

               6 truths of life….

            
1. You cannot touch all your teeth with your tongue.

2. All idiots, after reading the first truth, will try it.

3. The first truth is a lie.

4. You’re smiling now because you’re an idiot.

5. You soon will forward this to another idiot.

6. There’s still a stupid smile on your face.