Feeling better, but still "off". Thinking of old-school nerves...

BLOT: (30 Sep 2010 - 01:25:21 PM)

Feeling better, but still "off". Thinking of old-school nerves...

Yesterday's strange illness has mostly faded, but I'm still having an overall wobbly-body syndrome, a fairly sharp headache, and my sinuses are worse rather than better. I'm thinking, now, that it might be a virus and the symptoms are somehow asynchronous? If such a thing is possible, that could give me the somatic effects before the sinus ones, right? Or, maybe it's a curse? I don't know. I went outside for a bit earlier, but didn't do much. Thinking of going back out around 3 and walking for a bit, but I'm getting tired enough, now, that I might just sleep instead.

If this was the nineteenth century, no doubt someone would have deemed me having "the nerves" (or "the vapors", "fainting spells", and/or any other phrase they choose to designate a time of prolonged exhaustion). Some doctor would have me in bed for a week, sipping melted butter and having a pint of blood drained every day. I suppose a lot of those strange wasting-spells talked about were caused by vitamin deficiencies and common colds. Either that, or the human race used to have some random shut-down function that has disappeared in the past 150 years. You cannot claim to be taken with a fainting spell nowadays, though (by the literature) those things used to be fairly constant. With women and poets at any rate. Corsets might be to blame for the former. A tendency to be dramatic, the latter. Women also used to get "hysteria", which was cured by a doctor jilling them off until they had a paroxysm*. That's right, men, doctors used to give your wives and daughters handjobs and then charge you for it.** I wonder if that would be covered under Obamacare?

Alright, an hour of reading and tea drinking, and maybe I'll feel like doing something else other than sleep and making bad Victorian England jokes.

* "I'll take words actually used to talk about the sexy but sound like boring literary critique terms for $500, Alex."

** A Rodney Dangerfield- or Al Bundy-like joke seems appropriate here: "At $30 a go, it's a bargain!"

TAGS: Me in 2010

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 39
BY MONTH: September 2010