Self-Conscious Excerpt from a Letter to a Friend

"You know, it's funny, I look back at some of this writing on my blog over the past few years and I think, oy.  How preening and insufferable I could be.  My only hope (and it seems, from looking at the dates of the posts as they progress, that there's some evidence for this) is that cancer finally (finally!) beat all that useless, adolescent shit out of me."