Live Feed of an Empty Podium

Hey, hi, hello! <pulls drop cloth off laptop, blows dust off keyboard> Been a while, huh?You know how the period between Thanksgiving and New Year’s is usually so event-packed and schedule-disrupting that it takes until February before you feel like things are finally back to normal? I probably would’ve written something around that time, except (as you may or may not already know) I developed Bell’s palsy on the very last day of January and then almost immediately afterward The Billfold shut down, leaving the Dear Businesslady column without a home.I could explain here that all this left me too busy to churn out another tinyletter, and it would be mostly true. In addition to many other annoyances of Bell’s palsy (which, for the uninitiated, causes sudden-onset facial paralysis that in my case takes more than 9 weeks to resolve), it introduces a slew of time-consuming medical obligations into one’s life. But it’s also given me a ton of new weird experiences that I’m actually pretty eager to narrate and/or complain about.The reason I haven’t written anything is that I’m still in the middle of these two unexpected life events, and it’s hard to tell a story that doesn’t yet have a coherent arc. It’s especially pronounced with health stuff, which often drags out longer than our social etiquette knows how to deal with. When people ask “Are you feeling any better?” they want to hear “Oh, so much better” so that they can say “Wonderful!” and you can both start talking about other things. That’s not because they’re assholes (I mean, they might be, but I hope not, why are you hanging out with assholes anyway?). They may be more than happy to hear you gripe about your symptoms and treatments and copays for as long as you want to vent. But as the person afflicted, that can’t help but feel like you’re just infecting them with the same frustration and impatience that you’ve been doing your best to weather, and you can’t even do them the decency of wrapping it all up with a tidy moral or punchline.Or at least, I feel that way. The last time I had a Serious Medical Issue was when an infection from a ruptured appendix kept me hospitalized for a month and out of work for two, and by the end I felt like I was trapped in a TV drama whose writers were spinning their wheels. (Shoutout to fellow Lost fans, by the way.) By contrast, what I’m going through now is far less serious—it is not, for instance, likely to kill me—but the lowered stakes make the entire thing much more tedious.Then there’s the fate of the column, which is in an equally ambiguous state. I like giving career advice too much to let it languish, but thus far the media outlets of the world haven’t engaged in a frenzied bidding war for Dear Businesslady. So it’s on hiatus for now, and until that changes I can’t build a letter around the big announcement of its resurrection.But thanks to my tireless powers of verbosity, I can manage to produce 500+ words of commentary about how hard it is to write about my current situation. Magic! And if you haven’t been keeping up with Dear Businesslady since my last newsletter, there are THREE new columns for you to enjoy:

I will be back soon to regale you with stories about the travails of living with Bell’s palsy, hopefully culminating with my glorious recovery. If we’re really lucky, it’ll include news about the next installment of Dear Businesslady. (I still need questions to answer, so if you’ve got one, write to me!) But in the meantime, life goes on. Which is, frustrations aside, something worth celebrating. ~court POSTSCRIPTIf you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen a certain meme thread about Walt Whitman that went viral thanks to the hilarious creativity of my spouse's students. It's worth perusing the whole thing, but as a teaser, here's the one that made me literally drop to the floor and roll around in a fit of giggles. (And if you don't know the context, here's a quick explainer.)