As I lay dying — and by dying, I mean in the colloquial Southern sense of suffering from a physical malady nowhere close to terminal, but so irritating as to have left one unable to imagine for even a moment the possibility of a world without the present misery — I was able to muster up enough lucidity and self-pity to remember that the day just broken was, in fact, my birthday and that I could not recall ever having been ill on my birthday and that it was, well, patently unfair to be ill on one's birthday. As I lay dying — and by dying, I mean in the existential sense that we are all, every moment and with every breath, dying — for what eventually amounted to nearly an entire week, I let go of the self-pity, recognizing that when you've had as many birthdays as I have the law of averages is going to catch up with you eventually and you are going to be sick on your birthday and that, as with most things, fairness has absolutely nothing to do with it. So, as I lay dying, there was plenty of time for more than a few quixotic, fanciful and/or irrational thoughts about everything from toilet paper to television to tenderness.