Thanksgiving

There are a couple of things going on in my family right now. One is that my last living grandmother--my dad's mother--is in the hospital after undergoing heart surgery. The surprising thing about this story is not that she's not doing that well. It's that it turns out that my intense dislike of antibiotics runs in the family.

This is the kind of thing that's weird to hear for someone whose extended family is not at all close; I don't really know this grandmother very well (though I do know that she is mean and scary and is the Lamarckian source of my horrible ability to target fears and weaknesses in people and bring them to the attention of everyone), but I don't actually want her to die. Which it looks like she might.

Mainly, the danger is the ambient atmosphere of germs in hospitals. My mother's dad--a grandfather I knew not well, but enough--died of a staph infection after surgery. This is likely to be a problem in my grandmother's case, especially when you couple it with the apparently genetic inability to process antibiotics without initially getting sick.

This grandmother's really old, and it's weird that the main danger is not that they basically cut her in half and then sewed her back together; it's not even the germs themselves that live in the air in hospitals. It's the weakened or dead bacteria they've injected her with that are the most dangerous.

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Anyway, the next thing going on is that Thanksgiving's coming, and my little brother's getting here on Wednesday. I have a four day weekend, and my new computer's getting here tomorrow. I've bought two DVDs, or rather, one DVD and one DVD set: Roman Polanski's "The Fearless Vampire Killers", and the entire first season of the extremely private early sixties cartoon "Johnny Quest".

It should be awesome, or private, even. I just hope my grandmother doesn't die soon.