Suit Up and Show Up

Soapbox: A box or carton for soap; any box used as a platform by a person making an informal speech to a street audience.

I was going to write about my cold again today which is definitely, absolutely, positively not going to kill me. It was touch and go for a while but, once again, I have defeated the common cold. Rhino Virus, my ass. Anyway, after I finished my last post about my cold -- at that point I had not been able to verify whether it was going to be fatal or not -- SuperK yelled at me from the other room: "Ach. Again with the cold?" While she didn't specifically say she was tired of me talking about my cold, I was able to imply from the tone of her voice that the topic had been covered thoroughly enough.

Last night I got up off my death bed and went to a meeting. This is a large discussion group which annoys me more often than not, for no good reason other than I'm easily annoyed by almost everything. My experience with large meetings is that there is a smallish group of people who always have to talk, usually people who don't have that much to say and take a long time to get their point across. Some of us like the Big Stage. Some of us treat meetings like a comedy improv or a soapbox upon which we can stand and pontificate, even though they aren't that funny or don't have a good point to deliver. I have never done this, of course, which is why I can afford to be so intolerant.

After the meeting ended -- a pretty good meeting, as they all are -- I turned to the man sitting next to me who had announced that he was attending this meeting for the first time, and introduced myself. Turns out he was two weeks into his recovery. So I was given the opportunity to get up on my soap box and try to carry the message to a brand new guy, which is what we are tasked to do, after all. If history is any indicator I probably didn't have much success in helping him. But that's not the point, of course, rather that the act of trying to help someone else is what keeps me sober.

Man, am I up on a soapbox.