Today is World Diabetes Day, by golly, although I doubt I'm going to get cake. (And how funny would that be? I'd eat it, too.) It does present a good opportunity to stop and actually assess my life as a diabetic.

I know, that's not politically correct. I am not supposed to self-identify as a diabetic. I am supposed to call myself a Person with Diabetes or a Swell Guy with a Complicated Pancreas or Blood Glucose Challenged or whatever. I suppose there's a newsletter that I should subscribe to in order to get the proper talking points.

I am a diabetic. Sorry, but there it is. It's what I am, although of course it's not all that I am. I'm also an agnostic and an author and a father and a smartass and any number of other things. I call myself a diabetic because I need to keep that word at the forefront of my mind, and the leading edge of my thinking.

I suppose if I were a Type 1 diabetic, it might be easier to keep that in perspective. This is not to say that Type 1's have it in any way easier. In just about every area of life except for public opinion (they don't get as much of the whole "you dumb fatties had it coming" from the mainstream media, after all), it is definitely more of a bummer to be a Type 1. But when your very survival depends on regulating insulin and blood sugar levels at every moment of every day, I would assume that it's hard to forget that you are a diabetic. Or a person with diabetes. Or whatever floats your diabetic boat. (Boat with diabetes? Someone stop me.)

For Type 2's, there's a creep factor involved. In the early years, you can choose to treat your condition or not treat it, and the effects are waiting for you years down the line. I find myself making bargains with my diabetes. "See that cookie? That's a fine, fine cookie. I think I'll be diabetic tomorrow. I'll eat that cookie today, and tomorrow I'll eat nothing but lettuce and paper." And in a thousand little bargains ("okay, I'll have rice on that, but skip the tortilla..."), we make our way through a world that might eat us up one day.

We are imperfect, both Type 1's and 2's. I had occasion to meet our very own Kerri for dinner recently, and when we were ordering, I kept looking at her out of the corner of my eye to see if she was going to react to whatever carb-loaded tragedy I ordered. She totally called me on it, too.

"Are you afraid I'm going to criticize you if you order something bad?" she said, looking at me like I'd been caught doing something wrong, which of course I totally had been. She then turned around and ordered a slice of pizza every bit as forbidden as my chicken parm sandwich. We might have paid for it later, either in blood sugar spikes or especially depressing Proper Diabetic Foods, but at that moment, we were just people, and it was inexpressibly good.

We might be diabetics, but we're humans, too. That never changes, not even on World Diabetes Day.