What is
Tiredness. What a long, black road. My head was burning slightly last night and so I emptied two packets of ban langen, that miracle herb-root tempered with crystallised sugar, into one of S's tall drinking jars. The water's scalding heat escapes quickly through the glass. The potion makes me break into a sweat as I listen to Michael Apted's reserved British commentary on his "35 Up" and "42 Up" documentaries. It's a clean sweat, not one of those that gives you a clammy neck after a silly struggle uphill to get home on a bike heaving on low-sitting tires. I feel pleasantly switched on, with my head an electric lantern. I fall asleep to the steady, avuncular voice and wake up at three AM.
There was no alarm or perceivable event that caused me to get up. I just rose from the bed, naturally, automatically, dead-heavy and fussing. I push my way to the bathroom sink all lit up with a row of undressed glamour bulbs. I wonder if my roommate is home and whether I can get away with wearing just my blue tank top and peach underwear. I marvel at the pallor of my face as I brush my teeth. It never looks like this, a skeptical sheet, during the day. Since I've been living here where the winter afternoon sun can still burn right through your knee socks, I've been browned. Given the attention paid to race and ever more exclusive subgroups and cross-lineage permutations in this region, this marks me as Ethnic, more than ever.
I am no longer flirting with sickness. A fit of rapid uncontrollable little sneezes while writing at the library expelled me into the late afternoon sun. I didn't put on sunscreen today because it was so misty this morning. If I'd rung a huge bell, I thought, its appeals would not cut through that white haze. The sun was a cool coin slipped into the atmosphere as an afterthought. Sometime while I was in class underground, it came out in full force and the sky became a million miles of nothing again.
What am I writing about today? I didn't post yesterday because I didn't have anything to say and decided to escape the evening into the world of the Up documentaries. There were a couple of stories to critique for fiction class, but I could handle it. The handle was long enough to keep the spitting fire just out of range.
Again, the lack of desire for food visited me. I forgot to make rice last night and so didn't bring lunch today. My burrito from the Treehouse was tasty until I'd eaten half of it and all of a sudden, I could taste nothing but the heat of the broth and the salt steaming forth from the cilantro rice. Perhaps it's the cold. It's cruel that at last tonight I have time to strum, but have no voice to accompany it.
There is no moral of the day. This troubles me and pleases me. No, wait--I'd been rather unkind to those sneezing and coughing around me all week through indirect annoyance. I'd felt ambushed by illness all around and kept to myself. I may have even thought that it was due to carelessness or lack of good personal habits that the deus ex machina of communicable diseases descended on those particular proto-cases of achoos and hawking-up-eight-generations-of-deaths. I'd been prideful that I hadn't been sick yet this winter and was maybe ostentatious in my consistent washing of hands, grimacing at others' uncovered exhalations or dramatically public spitting.
This isn't self-flagellation for what is essentially a semi-random, soulless occurrence, but all this bother about medicines and rest--the damned inconvenience of not being able to take pleasure in being human, e.g. in food and song--is reminding me to be more compassionate, if not exactly conservative, towards those who are struck with various maladies.
There was no alarm or perceivable event that caused me to get up. I just rose from the bed, naturally, automatically, dead-heavy and fussing. I push my way to the bathroom sink all lit up with a row of undressed glamour bulbs. I wonder if my roommate is home and whether I can get away with wearing just my blue tank top and peach underwear. I marvel at the pallor of my face as I brush my teeth. It never looks like this, a skeptical sheet, during the day. Since I've been living here where the winter afternoon sun can still burn right through your knee socks, I've been browned. Given the attention paid to race and ever more exclusive subgroups and cross-lineage permutations in this region, this marks me as Ethnic, more than ever.
I am no longer flirting with sickness. A fit of rapid uncontrollable little sneezes while writing at the library expelled me into the late afternoon sun. I didn't put on sunscreen today because it was so misty this morning. If I'd rung a huge bell, I thought, its appeals would not cut through that white haze. The sun was a cool coin slipped into the atmosphere as an afterthought. Sometime while I was in class underground, it came out in full force and the sky became a million miles of nothing again.
What am I writing about today? I didn't post yesterday because I didn't have anything to say and decided to escape the evening into the world of the Up documentaries. There were a couple of stories to critique for fiction class, but I could handle it. The handle was long enough to keep the spitting fire just out of range.
Again, the lack of desire for food visited me. I forgot to make rice last night and so didn't bring lunch today. My burrito from the Treehouse was tasty until I'd eaten half of it and all of a sudden, I could taste nothing but the heat of the broth and the salt steaming forth from the cilantro rice. Perhaps it's the cold. It's cruel that at last tonight I have time to strum, but have no voice to accompany it.
There is no moral of the day. This troubles me and pleases me. No, wait--I'd been rather unkind to those sneezing and coughing around me all week through indirect annoyance. I'd felt ambushed by illness all around and kept to myself. I may have even thought that it was due to carelessness or lack of good personal habits that the deus ex machina of communicable diseases descended on those particular proto-cases of achoos and hawking-up-eight-generations-of-deaths. I'd been prideful that I hadn't been sick yet this winter and was maybe ostentatious in my consistent washing of hands, grimacing at others' uncovered exhalations or dramatically public spitting.
This isn't self-flagellation for what is essentially a semi-random, soulless occurrence, but all this bother about medicines and rest--the damned inconvenience of not being able to take pleasure in being human, e.g. in food and song--is reminding me to be more compassionate, if not exactly conservative, towards those who are struck with various maladies.
posted by greenyew at 4:05 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home