Thanks to the power of ice and redosing (two advil every five hours is what my pharmacist otherwise known as me has prescribed) I am here live and alive, ready and eager to blog to all of you, gloriously unchanged for two days in my galabea (fancy word for my Egyptian pajamas that, yes, I do occasionally wear in public).
I'm practicing writing really long sentences after a marathon of reading essays by the amazing David Foster Wallace (RIP), who wrote 100 pages about taking a cruise. One hundred pages about an experience mostly spent on the inside of his minuscule cabin because of his self-proclaimed agoraphobia. It's a fabulous essay and so is the one about the Illinois State Fair, which I mentioned in my last blog. I've never read anything before whereby the author starts out by outright insulting his editors and getting away with it. But they are not gratuitous insults, they are truthful ones. And the editors put up with it (although I notice they got edited out) but still, they paid him and gave him more jobs. Of course he was a brilliant writer, so that definitely helps in the getting away with it department. (Note to my current and potential editors: I promise that I am well aware that I could never get away with insulting my editors in my copy, nor would I ever want to. Code: please give me more paying work.)
So, this is what you do when you are flat on your back in bed. Besides looking out the window at the leaves and trees and noticing how one of the tree branches looks just like a descending snake, a head like that character on the Jungle Book movie. I would attempt to draw it, but it's hard to draw when you are flat on your back. I could appreciate why Frida Kahlo had a mirror attached to her ceiling, and then painted all sorts of weird things about her perceived and real body deformities, her having to be flat on her back for weeks and months at a time.
When you are flat on your back all your addictive NPR listening habits become heightened. I am now an expert on the Libyan revolution, the East Coast earthquake, and that former IMF guy who was able to forge a consensual relationship with a chamber maid in a mere nine-minutes. (Evidently, he was known for his charm.) Listening to NPR is awesome when you are flat on your back and staring at the ceiling or at the tree branch snake outside the window (or in the car or at work or cooking dinner).
It's hard not to get depressed when you are flat on your back. It takes me approximately three hours to transition from "hey, it's so nice to be still" to "oh my god, they'll have to check me into a nursing home soon." You start thinking about the sick, the invalid, the sad, the lonely. You realize just how close you are to all those things.
And it all started with a simple fluffing of the hair. All I meant to do was bend over (bad idea) and fluff up my newly washed, sprayed, and curled hair to look the freshest I could look on the way to work. And, zing, an electrical charge goes up the back, and the hair-fluffer falls to her knees staring close at the crumbs on the floor and that's about it. I think we'll be going back to the flattening iron -- no fluffing involved. Back to the no-nonsense look.
When you are flat on your back you think about all the things that you've been wanting to do like washing the dishes, scrubbing the floor, cleaning out the boy's bedroom from top to bottom and front to back, getting out the press release, updating the website, making extra keys, driving the kids around to endless hours of activities--all the glorious living that you miss so much.
Me and my galabea gotta go. And we thank you so much for coming by and send our apologies if there's anything we did to convey that this blog post had anything substantial to say.
With love, T (et al)
