(Photo by Caters News Agency and ganked by me from Yahoo News)

Apparently there is a lake in the middle of the island of Palau that, having separated from the ocean, now contains an estimated 8 million jellyfish that have evolved to all but lose their sting. Those with sensitive skin, which would be me, can sometimes still detect a small sting, but nothing that will hurt you. I wouldn’t want to get too much of that water in my mouth because it sounds like the algae content of extremely high, but I would love to find to what it feels like to have the jellyfish brush up against you sans searing pain.

In high school I inadvertently swam with sharks, while swimming with friends to a bay on Catalina Island from a boat anchored roughly a mile offshore. We looked down at one point and there were dozens of leopard sharks ranging from two to four feet in length swimming about 15 feet below us. Leopard sharks aren’t known for attacking people so I doubt we were in any danger but I wasn’t going to go down any further and say hello, you know. Still, I treasure that memory. Nothing moves through the water as gracefully and effortlessly as a shark and to see so many of them up so close just doing their thing? Magical!

The whole story of the Finnish President’s husband getting busted admiring the royal breasts of the Danish Princess - at a state dinner hosted by her mother-in-law, the Queen of Denmark no less! – had me laughing out loud. Click here for a link to the article and one of the photos if  you missed it and want to read it from an actual news source.

I find it funny and oddly endearing that it seems all boys, even royal boys raised to uphold the highest etiquette at all times, can’t resist a peak every now and then. Hey, I’m sure boys who prefer boys peak a fair bit too, just not at breasts. We ladies do it too, if we’re being honest…it would just seem that we’re generally better at not getting busted. I think his facial expression is my favorite part – classic man trying very much to be subtle and thinking he is succeeding brilliantly at said endeavor while actually failing at it quite miserably.

Look, if I were his wife, the only part I would be annoyed about is the media picking up on the incident. Otherwise, I would be amused and tease him more than a bit about it. No, really. I would. Honestly, if my husband ever stopped noticing and admiring the many female forms around him, I would be seriously concerned about his health…and he can and does say the same thing of me. There’s a lot of pretty out there in the world, boys and girls. If you’re in a committed relationship, by all means, do not play with that which does not belong to your beloved but there is absolutely no harm in enjoying the view.

And if I were the Princess…well, I would also be amused but I think I would have tried to help the guy save a little face by gesturing to my amazing necklace and commenting something to the effect of “Thank you. I’ve always thought it was lovely too. It was a gift from my husband, blah, blah, blah,” as if it were, indeed, the necklace he was ogling and had just asked me about it. That way he knows he was busted without the situation getting any more awkward, that and a little kindness couldn’t hurt diplomatic relations any…besides think of the stories for the royal memoirs later.

I am 36 today…an age which sounded terribly old not 10 years ago but doesn’t feel anything even remotely like middle age let alone old now. Bully for me.

You know how, when someone who isn’t your close friend asks you your age on your birthday, once you’ve passed the age of say 24 or 25 you’re supposed to say something cute like “old enough to know better”? Well, you’re supposed to at any rate. I am far more inclined to actually say my age because I don’t much care, but social conventions and all that. Anyway it feels like I have been “old enough to know better” for way too long, as if that in and of itself is getting seriously old even if I am not.

So I have decided that, starting this year, instead of being “old enough to know better” I am instead officially “no longer too young to be this cynical”. Well, it made me smile and cracked up Mortgaged and my coworkers, at any rate.

For the week leading up to Chet’s funeral, I cried every day at the drop of a hat. Memories, catching snatches of songs, doing the little things that Mortgaged and I could do to help his family and the waterworks would begin. The funeral was cathartic and I thought I was more under control. Then, a few days later I found myself sobbing in a coworker’s office for no reason.

It was the perfect scene for a comedy really. This particular coworker is a lot like me, in that we both might as well be stereotypical guys when a woman who isn’t family begins crying in front of us. Wh-wh-what do I do? Hug? *begin to move arms to hug* No. *Halt arm movement* Pat shoulder? *begin to move arms to pat shoulder* No. *Halt arm movement* Hug? *begin to move arms to hug* No. *Halt arm movement* Say something comforting? *mumble something sincerely desirous of being comforting that  is ultimately unintelligible.* No. Pat shoulder? *begin to move arms to pat shoulder* No. *Halt arm movement* You get the general idea.

Basically, my assessment that I was fine was laughably incorrect. Instead, I was apparently hyper saturated with emotion to the point that my demeanor mimicked calm, much like boiling sugar and water well on the way to becoming caramel might appear to be liquid but is really a solution hyper saturated with sugar. I discovered this when, much with like the proto caramel analogy, the addition of even one sliver of additional emotion, in this case disagreeing slightly over a photo for the newsletter, became like a seed crystal which pulled all of the other emotions out of solution into one big emotional mess.

So there I was trying desperately not to cry over something that, of course, seemed to my coworker to be nothing even remotely worth crying over. So I tried to explain myself which just made the tears that much more inevitable. Once the tears simply refused to be blinked back, she reacted as I described above, which added yet one more emotional seed crystal to my rapidly falling out of solution, emotional solution: guilt and discomfort that I was dumping this on her inappropriately and causing her discomfort. That caused the outright sobbing to begin as she half tried to hug me, then pat my shoulder, then say something comforting and then began it all over again. High comedy, really. Fit for the big screen. But somewhat cathartic again.

I’ve been better by bits and stages since then. No tears for a few days, then lots of random tears. Fine for a few days again, then insomnia. I can write again, which is great because writing is therapy, and then I can’t. Okay, so it’s grieving mother-may-I style. Two steps forward, 1.75 steps back…if I’m lucky. The other day, climbing into my car, the song on the radio was Tim McGraw’s Live Like You Were Dying, a song that usually causes me to change the station for being over the top maudlin, but that day it just hit me and I started to tear up.

Before I actually started to cry though, I could just picture Chet reacting to the situation if, somehow, I were telling him the story and all of the tears were for someone else. Really? Over Old Whiny Pants Tim McGraw? This is exactly how Chet always referred to Mr. McGraw and his musical stylings and, while I do own a couple of his CDs, I can’t say the description isn’t apt. I could practically hear his voice and picture the mixture of concern and mild mocking on his face saying it, which made me smile and prompted a memory - discussing Old Whiny Pants Tim McGraw and other musicians we appreciated but only some of the time with Chet while driving down a pitch black stretch of middle of nowhere road at some wee hour while Mortgaged slept in the back seat on one of those many, many trips the three of us took to Las Vegas and Laughlin over the years. And I smiled more deeply and started to laugh. It’s been kind of a roller coaster but I guess this is how getting better begins?

…right up until you can’t share one for a while. Mortgaged and I are decidedly an affectionate couple. We’ll have been together for 16 years this May and although I have heard that the level of simple, enjoyable, affectionate touching – hand holding, random caresses, kissing and the like – is supposed to level off a few years into a relationship, thank goodness that has never been the case with us. In fact, we have often said that we could never attend the black V-Day parties Batosai used to throw/still throws for the simple reason that we can’t sit together or be near one another at a party and not touch each other at some point, a quick hand squeeze, a shoulder caress, one of our hands lightly resting on the other’s knee…it’s just the nature of Mortgaged and I and our relationship with one another and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

So cut to this week and the fever blisters. Gah! I hate fever blisters and I am currently sporting several itchy, sore, icky clusters of them all around the nostrils of my very prominent nose. Basically, I crashed hard after the funeral on Saturday and fell ill with flu like symptoms and a high fever all day Sunday and most of Monday. And sadly, ever since childhood when I completed the chicken pox to scarlett fever to a extended bout with fever blisters in my eye Trifecta missing roughly a third of kindergarten in the process, a high fever gives me a 50/50 chance of breaking out in these hyper contagious blisters either back around the eye, or around my nose.

And the most annoying thing about them is not the pain, nor the itch, nor the need to avoid touching my nose except to apply meds, nor is it the fact that I look like I have W.C. Field's nose. Nope, it’s the fact that fever blisters scattered over the base of my nostrils = no kissing for this girl…no kissing and no…well…you get the general idea…no anything that would cause anything to brush up against my face just above my upper lip. Not since Tuesday night. Ladies and gentlemen currently in relationships, imagine how hard it would be to be around your S.O. and unable to kiss them for what will eventually be more than a week. Well, trust me, it’s actually even harder than that. No, it is not the end of the world and it is a situation that will be remedied at some point in the next week or so but, still, very frustrating for all parties concerned.

When I got home from work last night Mortgaged informed me with a sad little laugh that Chet had taken possession of the remote control again – a common enough occurrence when we three lived together, obviously impossible now. But for whatever reason, the various cable stations were littered with Clint Eastwood movies last night, and that was Mortgaged’s meaning.

Well, if Chet had possession of the remote control last night, then this evening it was the radio dial in my car. It started with the Who’s Behind Blue Eyes, which I can only listen to for so long right now without tearing up. So I flipped through my presets, past two stations mid-commercial break and then paused on the third. The song playing was the Who’s Baba O’Riley. Highly coincidental, yes? But this particular Who is so very much my favorite that I could listen and sing along and generally enjoy the bejesus out of it, despite the fact that this one, as much one of his favorites as one of mine, also reminds me of Chet.

Same station, next song, Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water. I guess that’s not an atypical transition, but it’s another Chet favorite and, again, one I was able to enjoy without breaking down. I flipped stations a few times on the way to Pilates and back but it seems the evening was meant to be one of Chet music, or more specifically music of the sort where his tastes and mine overlapped. (I had to retype that one twice to get it in the past tense. This is hard.). Music we three listened to on Mortgaged’s and my old five disc changer, Circuit City special late into the night, drinking until the pigeons woke up, as we used to say. Music that kept us awake, in a good mood and chatting on all those late night drives across the middle of nowhere off to somewhere fun – Las Vegas, Laughlin, Cambria. Music we’d play at the B&B B&B when lived with us on weeknights while we busted out a deck of cards, or Settlers of Catan.

Among the additional songs I heard on this evening’s ride, Led Zeppelin’s Ten Years Gone, with Jimmy Page’s amazing guitar work. Stevie Ray Vaughn’s Pride and Joy. The Rolling Stones Gimme Shelter. And just as I was driving up to our house from the freeway, Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here…yeah, I almost lost it when that one came on the radio.

Clearly most of these are songs that play on the radio out here with great frequency – less so Pride and Joy and Ten Years Gone almost never, but still. And Chet, Mortgaged and I like a lot of music. A lot, a lot actually, so the areas where our tastes overlap are vast indeed. So, coincidence. Clearly coincidence…but it was what I needed to hear all the same. Hearing Stairway to Heaven at Starbuck’s yesterday when I want to buy coffee reduced me to a sobbing mess in the car. Behind Blue Eyes nearly did me in again this evening but the rest was comforting. Nice memories and comfort. Like a Chet hug. And all in my imagination or not, I will take it.