Reading: Mohawk

Moving: I'm breathing, ain't I? Some days that's enough

Watching: "Pride and Prejudice"

Listening: This Is the Sea

24 August 2000: Loose Your Head and Let It Spin

I am sick again. I am never sick, damn it, and this is the second time in less than three weeks.

I didn't take my last pill until late Saturday so I got my period when I woke up Tuesday instead of mid-Monday. That was fine. So when I had a blinding headache Wednesday morning, I figured it was just my regular second-day worst day, a day behind; my cramps have been manifesting in headaches over the past year or more. My left eye drooped the way it does when I'm tired. Several people at work noticed that I was pale or droopy or not as chipper as I usually am--that last was from the office manager when I scammed Advil from the house supply around 10. I had walked in fine, finishing The Archivist then listening to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, but I found myself nearly asleep in the shower so when the manager saw me, I was on my decline.

So I went home just after 2:00. I shivered uncontrollably on the overly air-conditioned bus, teeth chattering, probably looking like a methadone addict overdue for a dose (which, on that bus, just makes me fit in better--I don't like my new bus route much). It was probably in the high 90s, and walking the few blocks from the stop to my house (my house! yippee!) warmed me up just enough that I stopped shivering.

At that point, my head invited my lower intestine to join in the torture fest, which is all you want to know about that. I tried to nap, I tried to read, I tried to watch the 1995 BBC "Pride and Prejudice," which arrived in the same package as "Brazil," and I found that boring and unwatchable, which is some indication of just how miserable I felt. I ended up sleeping on the family room floor, on a Thermarest and comforter and under a blanket, so I could get up repeatedly without bothering RDC, so I could read when sleep fled me. He suggested the couch or the futon, but I wanted firm, firm, firm. I am running a fever, round and round its little exercise wheel, or it is running me; in the cool basement under just a thin cotton blanket I sweated through the comforter and rearranged a drier spot under me. Otherwise I spasmed with cold. Maybe I have malaria.

And of course I drink a lot of water, but at this point I'm dehydrated as the Mojave, losing fluids and too nauseated (without actually spewing) to drink more.

Well, at least today I was feeling better enough that six hours of "Pride and Prejudice" pleased me utterly. That production still lacks important scenes, though: Elizabeth's conversation with Col. Fitzwilliam when he warns her of his need to marry better and when she unknowingly prompts a hint from him about Georgiana Darcy; and some other background, in order that Elizabeth, reading Darcy's letter, could more realistically see the reasons behind his actions. And I've never been pleased with the casting of Caroline Bingley in any version--she shouldn't be that ugly. Of the three versions I've seen, this is by far the best. I like that Jennifer Ehle looks so much like the portrait on the cover of the Penguin edition. Greer Garson is Mrs. Chips, not Elizabeth Bennet. Colin Firth belongs to that class of dark-haired, dark-eyed, not-too-pretty, generous-nosed men that I so enjoy looking at.

When my hand slipped and I accidentally bought "Brazil" and "Pride and Prejudice" on DVD, I also kind of just a little bit bought a book and an album: Taran Wanderer, which I read yesterday evening and night and in the wee hours this morning when I could focus enough to follow its complexities,* and the Waterboys' This Is the Sea. So now I'm sitting here listening to This Is the Sea ("Your love feels like trumpets") and Fisherman's Blues, surfing, and glancing at my roses.

*Lloyd Alexander seems to determined singlehandedly to restore the art of dialogue properly broken into paragraphs. Mostly people write thus:

He said, "Ya ya ya. And on a completely different subject, thus-and-so."

Usually, nowadays, writers of dialogue keep a single speech, on however many topics, all in one paragraph. Alexander separates topics by paragraph, as is proper in writing (though not mine) but not very common in contemporary written dialogue.

He said, "Ya ya ya.
"And on a completely different subject," he continued, "thus-and-so." [Note no quotation mark closing the first paragraph]

The thing is he does this so much it must be deliberate. It reminds me of this time in second grade when I was reading something and came upon a construction something like "book(s)". A classmate's much older sister was cadet-teaching from the high school, and I asked her what that meant, and she didn't know. Obvious enough now, sure, and probably, because I read so much, known by the time I started cadet-teaching myself. He does it in all his children's books, so often that it's even distracting. Besides, the way he writes it is redundant: the absence of the closing quotation mark indicates that the same character continues speaking the next paragraph well enough that the tag "he continues" is unnecessary. I'm convinced the one-paragraph-per-speech thing is Alexander's pet peeve and he wants his young readers to learn how to work around it.

But when I'm reading a children's book at 3:00 a.m., I just want more Aeddan and Llonio and Fflewddur Fflam, damn it, not lessons in punctuation.

Around noon RDC walked out to buy some Thai food for his lunch (the best Thai food in Denver is just a few blocks away). He came back with whatever he ate and a sheaf of long-stemmed red roses. I think this was just about the point when Bingley proposes to Jane, so I was immediately in tears. RDC generally calls cut flowers the amputees of the plant world, so this was uniformly charming. ("Uniformly charming" is how Mr. Collins describes Elizabeth when she declines his proposal--she was just being coy and genteel and modest, of course.) The roses came after eighteen hours of pampering--blowing up the Thermarest, fetching me Imodium (why is it spelled with one m between the first and second syllables when it's pronounced im-MO-dee-um and not I-mo-DEE-um? or why is it pronounced one way and spelled another? English, English, to be sure, but this isn't English but Brandese, which I, as Empress of the Universe, disallow.) and Tylenol, gauging my temperature, general doting--all of which he did interspersed with priming the walls of the hallway, while I lay about restively dozing, hulching over my belly, and dashing for the bathroom.

This afternoon I managed to do the dishes and some laundry, and I cut and arranged the roses in two vases--there were so many and I don't have big vases. I put one vase on RDC's desk and another on mine. I didn't deliberately count, but he noticed that I gave him the vase with twelve and kept the one with 13. "You have a baker's dozen," he teased me.

This is from last week when he was watching television in exactly the idle manner I feared we would begin to do after getting a dish. He watched "The Thirteenth Warrior" on one of the movie channels while I sat at my desk (and kind of not really watched the movie reflected in the glass of one of my collages). To be honest, this was a movie I'd wanted to see, solely because of Antonio Banderas. (I can't be that much in lust with him, though--is that his first name?) But I didn't, for whatever reason. Later, he defended it as actually an okay movie with Banderas as a Moor leading a pack of Norsemen (as, historically, makes such a lot of sense) in whatever they were trying to do. I got the impression not all of them survived, so I asked, "So this was kind of a baker's dirty dozen?" (I've wanted to see "The Dirty Dozen" and "The Magnificent Seven" again for some time now.) It took him a second, but he grinned. It is so rare for me to make him laugh that he remembered the comment a fortnight later to count the roses with.

Blake quite likes the roses now. They arrived rolled in wrapping paper, which as all sensible cockatiels know is very very very bad and scary and mortally threatening. He has always hated wrapping paper, a phobia I really don't understand. Now, with leaves drooping over the rim of the vase, they are highly desirable. His other big fear is the vent RDC removed from the dryer last week. It's tinfoil-y, and he's never been scared of tinfoil, but it's about six inches in diameter and ten feet long. Maybe it looks like a snake. The vent is lying on top of a stack of boxes in the basement that we haven't brought outside yet, which we should do if not for the tidiness of the house at least for Blake's well-being.

---

I bought a frame for Granny when I went home last month intending to have filled it with the picture of me looking hot hot hot. Of course, I hadn't printed it in time, so last week I mailed it to my mother in a card in which I did finally tell her the cramp story, referring to myself as a constant disappointment. Today I received an actual letter from her that she actually wrote that was actually longer than three sentences that was, indeed, three whole pages long. In closing, she wrote, "You have never been a constant disappointment to me." I do like her quite a bit sometimes.

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Last modified 24 August 2000

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