Coming out the ass end of my cold

BLOT: (22 Oct 2011 - 10:39:47 AM)

Coming out the ass end of my cold

On Monday night, I got sick. On Tuesday morning, I got sicker. I'd go so far as to say that by Wednesday and Thursday, I got even sicker. It ranged from a crippling sore throat, to a painfully stopped sinuses, to some combination of both. What is worse, the pain on Monday and the hard time breathing from Tuesday through Thursday nights meant I was getting very little sleep. Most nights, I was lucky to get more than an hour's consecutive sleep. Which meant I was not really dreaming. I would lay down, convinced I wasn't sleeping at all and then it would be three hours later because I kept passing out for half-hour segments. Yesterday, thank the universe, we had money to get some Sudafed (the real stuff, not the neutered stuff) and not only was able to breathe enough to get some sleep and just relax, but I'd have to say that life is pretty damned swell right now. At least some of my continued sickness was sleep deprived exhaustion, which has been half cured (though, alas, not fully because my body is wanting more of that).

Last night's dreams were a barrage of missing REM (as opposed, to you know, missing R.E.M., which I do not, though surely someone does, somewhere). Most of them were short and spastic, flashes of color and concepts. The only long dream I had ended up with me and Nathan (of the Makers-Local crowd) sitting at table in a diner stuffing plastic bags full of seeds and...photographs? Swapping dating advice that we were clearly making up on the spot. I'm sure it was symbolic or something.

Today I am back at the reference desk for a 9 hour stint. Had a similar shift yesterday but yesterday it kind of hurt to have my head held up and today I feel a bit "hungover" but the sickness is backed off enough that outside of a sporadic cough and a stuffy but not too stuffy nose, I think I am fine. Have tomorrow off, which I will dedicate to whipping out the last bits of this disease, and then I'll work on Monday and have a couple days off in a row. Hopefully, by then, I'll remember what being well felt like.

Speaking of which, I had someone close to me talk about the difficulty of remembering what feeling not-depressed was like after being depressed for a bit, and I realized that this is sort of true state of any human when we are in a specific doldrum. Not a non-specific one. Someone who is prolongedly down and out will fetishize their better days until they destroy the memory of them into legend; but you get someone newly depressed, or ill, or stressed out, and they will be hard put to summon a mental concept of a time where they were not. They will be able to go, "I was not sick yesterday," or, "I was not depressed last Spring," but actually remembering what it was like to be non-sick will be very hard. I find this fascinating, and wonder if overcoming this could be anything like a treatment: a cure of depression by remembering non-depression, a help for sickness by remembering non-sickness.

As a few quick post-scripts by way of links. First off, proof that we live, as I said on Twitter, in Bizarro world (aka Alabama): our governor is going to cut our education budget and prevent any sort of additional funds being raised for it, as a way to STOP pro-ration. By which he means: if we know we're screwed—if, for analogy, we know that our collective anuses are being well sudsed up for a bit of the old drop the soap in the prison shower game—then we will just have to take it as opposed to clenching up and pretending we have a choice. Because, well, Alabama is much like a prison shower: hot, humid, full of disenfranchised people, and largely kept solvent by federal funds. I assume that if Bentley could, he would give half of the education budget away to private institutions and declare it a good thing, and the fact that he hasn't means that he can't, but I'll keep my "totally surprised but not really" face around for the occasion.

More specifc to the Huntsville area, our local humane society is going to adopt a catch, neuter, release program. Which means you catch strays, have them neutered, and then released back. This effectively means that the stray population cannot breed into an explosion, will help drive off other strays, and will actually keep some of the pests down. It sounds a little weird, almost a little cruel, but I'm under the impression that it has worked really well in other municipalities that have tried it.

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: October 2011