I am drowning again in some respulsive Disease. Unclean! Unclean! Plus also I am 26 and miss my mommy and it is very hard to be a big girl in the big city when you are lying around in Darth Maul boxers and a Mickey Mouse tanktop feeling sorry for yourself.

I will tell you this much, The Disease is throwing my weight loss for a loop. (Or maybe it isn’t. I don’t dare weigh myself because I’m sure there’s at least ten extra pounds of snot involved.) On Friday I went to the walk-in clinic because I was almost literally too ill to move. Those eight blocks took about half an hour, three times as long as normal. It turned out to be a serious, serious lung infection and they kept me there for half the morning while they did emergency X-rays and yelled at me for using Advil to self-treat. Oops. The doctor wanted to hospitalize me and put me on an antibiotic IV, but I balked and he finally gave up and put me on a really, really powerful antibiotic that I have to take four pills a day for a week. I took the first dose after games night on Friday (I figured the two adult beverages I had wouldn’t have any effect because it didn’t say anything on the info insert). Went to bed, slept about nine hours, so far so hoopy. Saturday was when the side effects started to kick in.

Holyshitmotherfuckingsonofamotherlessgoat.

One side effect both of the insane fever and the antibiotics (and, I presume, the ten pounds of snot) is nausea to a level I have never previously encountered. Seriously, this is what it must be like to have morning sickness when pregnant. I can’t eat anything I want to eat. Anything even remotely soft or textured or flavoured in any way activates my gag reflex. And I didn’t think I had a gag reflex! Once I swallowed a whole grape! I’ve nearly swallowed toothbrushes without gagging! (Note: not on purpose.)

I found this out the hard way with one spoonful of tomato soup that had me sprinting the, uh, six steps to my bathroom. (All right, it’s a small apartment.) Things that have proven OK: Golden Delicious apples, dry toast, unflavoured triscuits (rosemary and olive oil flavour NOT OK), dry crackers. Hot water with lemon. No tea. I can’t believe I’ve lived three days without tea. Even when I was staying with my uncle in the Guyana savannah studying fricking bullet ants, we had tea. (And centipedes, might I add. Tea and centipedes, that’s cool. I’m going to start a band and name it that.)

Here is the info insert for the fucking drug:

Pardon my mild and understandable annoyance, but WHO THE HELL DESIGNED AN ANTIBIOTIC THAT GIVES YOU HALLUCINATIONS?!

The reason I am posting is because yesterday after my second dose I actually did have a hallucination. And honestly, I’m fairly used to auditory and olfactory hallucinations, of which I’ve had quite a few over the past few years. They’re fine because you know you’re hallucinating and that takes away their power to scare me. Two examples:

1) I have a very, very, very common olfactory hallucination of gasoline. This came up once in an, um, intimate moment with my ex - who was as scrupulously clean as a cat and who would spend the entire day in the shower lathering and scrubbing if you let him, who always showered before dates and scrubbed out every nook and cranny. And I rolled over, sat up, and thought This is an olfactory hallucination but let’s just ask anyway, and said, “Did you fill up the truck today?” and he hadn’t. I pressed him for details on what else he’d been doing that day. It turned out he had stayed in and watched war documentaries. No gasoline at all.

2) (Slightly funnier) When The Hussy came to visit for the first time last year, we woke up on Sunday morning or whatever it was and I came out of the bedroom yawning and scratching my hair and he was already up and doing something on my computer. And I heard: “I AM THE GREAT GOD BAAL.”
I said, “What?”
BAAAAAAAAL.
He said, “What?”
I said, “Did you just say something?”
“No. I’m checking my Facebook!”
“Did you hear… the ceiling making any noises or anything?”
“No.”
“…Did your stomach just make a noise?”
He gave me a terribly pitying look and said, “Let’s just go out for breakfast, OK?”

But the hallucinations I got on this drug are completely beyond the pale. The dizziness and the nausea and the confusion and the disorientation and the persistent fever are tolerable. Barely tolerable.

After my first dose yesterday I started feeling dizzy and went to lie down on my futon and watch ‘Blue Planet,’ because David Attenborough is my go-to guy when I’m feeling really wretched. I had just gotten through ‘The Deep’ when the phone rang, and I had put the phone on the little side-table Lamo designed so I had it and my celphone within close reach because, hello lazy when I’m sick. I picked it up and saw the familiar ‘PARENTS’ on the orange call-display screen, and sat up, preparing my speech to tell my mother just how horrible I was feeling and that I had gone to the clinic like she said.

As soon as I sat up I was hit with a terrible wave of vertigo, sweat sprang to my forehead, and I stood up in preparation to run to the bathroom - but the phone was still ringing so I thought I’d just quickly pick it up and tell Mom that I was about to vomit like Regan Macneil and I’d call her back, so I pressed ‘talk’ and a stream of gibberish exited my mouth. Mom said, “Hello? Hello? Prem? Are you all right?” and I was trying to talk, trying to talk, nothing coming out but random burbling noises, and suddenly I lurched sideways and hit the carpet like a ton of bricks, knocking over one of my banana plants whose pot smashed to bits on its neighbouring pot. I lay there stupefied, blood trickling from a gash on my forearm where I’d put it down on a chunk of ceramic, terrified beyond words, still trying to talk to my mother - trying to scream for help and telling her that I’d just fallen and was lying on my scanner and a pile of paperbacks and I was bleeding and also I’d broken the pot that Dad brought for me when I moved in, sweating, on the verge of throwing up, watching the shining blood bubble and drip onto the carpet, and I said, “Oh fuck! My security deposit!” and she finally said, “Language!”

And then I was across the room, leaning on my world map. None of that happened. It was a hallucination. I was fine. The phone was back on the side table. I looked around, astonished, and saw that my balcony door was taped shut and it was snowing outside. The room was stiflingly hot so I went to the door and looked down. Chunks of green ceramic and the square block of the banana plant’s roots littered the ground and the spot of blood had changed from a circle to a triangle. I stared at it. I distinctly remember not only staring at it but the hairs on the back of my neck trying their damndest to stand up. It really did happen! It wasn’t a hallucination! I stepped carefully over the pieces and reached up as high as I could to grab the start of the tape strip, and pulled it down, and opened the balcony door to admit a welcome blast of cold air.

That didn’t happen either.

I taped up my balcony door in October. I untaped it in December. There was no tape. It didn’t happen.

When I ‘came to’ again I was standing in my hallway, staring at my dinosaur photos. This time it seemed to stick, the awakeness I mean, and I crept over to the computer desk and the balcony and my plants. They were perfectly intact, as was my arm. The balcony door was shut and locked. There was no blood on the carpet. No duct tape on the floor.

Mom called after dinner and the first thing I asked was whether she’d called earlier, because I thought perhaps a ringing phone really did become part of my hallucination, but she said, “No, we were on the south side all day. We ate paneer curry at Maurya Palace!” “Uh-huh,” I said. “Was Al home?” No, Al had spent the day at school working on some kind of plexiglass thing or something. “All day?” “Yes, all day. Why?”

Huh.

I should be contacting my doctor or something, but I am determined to stick out this drug. My lungs are seriously fucked up beyond the pale. I saw the X-rays. I’m coughing like a crazy old man who’s smoked for ninety years. This is the strongest antibiotic the doctor said he could give me without checking me into the hospital and I have to get rid of The Disease. But damn, it’s going to be a long week.

I thought the fever ‘broke’ like it does in the books, but it’s back with a VENGEANCE and I’m dripping with sweat sitting in front of an open window with a -5 breeze, but the fever does provide me with a jolly good excuse for the mildly insane act I just perpetrated, so now that that’s all done I am going to go do some Nyquil with an Advil chaser and when I wake up tomorrow I will put up a photo essay on SodaCraze because it goes with the theme.

The theme of crazy.

Speaking of genetics, my cousin just put up this photo of her little girl on FB with the caption “Jessie looks EXACTLY like Prem did at 20 months!”

Holy crap, she. totally. does. Same nose, same mouth, same eyes, same hair, same playing with our mothers’ glasses. This leads me to suspect that should I have a daughter, she will look exactly like that at 20 months too.

Wow. I’m still doing double-takes.

Oh my God, do I ever miss genetics. I found this list today (composed circa early 2000) and my heart shattered.

YOU MIGHT BE A FREAKY GENETIMATISTICIAN IF:

- You never swat a fly before checking its eyes and wings for new mutations
- You can spell the scientific name for yeast
- You can spell it backwards too
- Your favourite pickup line is “Let me take you back to my place and I’ll do your karyotype all night long”
- You have enough discarded Punnett squares to paper the Reichstagg
- You name your dog E. collie
- You drool when anyone mentions conjugation
- You are homozygous recessive at the weenie locus
- You make jokes about being homozygous recessive at the weenie locus
- You refer to a newlywed couple as ’stably base-paired’
- More than one guest at your house has been rushed to the ER after eating the little slab of blue Jell-O in your fridge
- You just thought ER stood for ‘endoplasmic reticulum’
- You refer to the male genitalia as the ’sex pilus’
- And to female genitalia as ’sticky ends’
- You can draw a Holliday junction with your eyes shut
- You have one tattooed on your ass-eye
- You call cigarettes ‘mutagen sticks’
- You call your beaded necklace your ‘plasmid’
- Of a Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western blot, you know which one doesn’t exist
- And what the other three are for
- And how to perform each
- You refer to your parents as ‘repressors’
- You invoke DNA evidence in an argument about literature
- You keep trying to ultracentrifuge your siblings in a cesium-chloride gradient to prove your hypothesis about which one is the most dense
- You’ve had wet dreams about Jacob and Monod
- You’ve done so many Southern blots that you no longer recoil at the suggestion of a probe
- You occasionally tell your hairdresser to ‘cleave a little off the 3′ end and supercoil the rest’
- You get way too excited when your dentist tells you about your plaque… because you want to examine its morphology
- You spent most of your formative years watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles not because they were ninjas or turtles but mutants
- And you went crazy trying to figure out what mutagens were in the ooze
- And you tried to use balancer chromosomes to create a pure-breeding ninja turtle

Goddammit. My glory days!

Last week, I felt a little off. All week I couldn’t write or draw or exercise or concentrate; I had to wind myself up like a toy for social events and the interview on Wednesday. This week I resolved to do better, I wanted a can-do attitude, I wanted to be practical and efficient and get! things! done! with exclamation marks because the things, they would be done so successfully that no one could do them ever again in the history of the world for fear of feeling inadequate compared to me. I started today with a really good to-do list.

I thought I’d begin with a workout. Whilst putting on my shorts, I lost my balance and crashed into my boombox (which, I should mention, still has a poltergeist in it and which was almost destroyed again a while back when I crashed into it doing a bellydancing DVD). That started things off with a huge bruise on my thigh. The fact that it is shaped somewhat like a face in profile isn’t as funny as I thought it would be because it hurts like an SOB.

Screw the workout, right? I peeled the bag of frozen Asian-style mixed vegetables off the bruise and decided to go downtown for the police records check I’ve been requested to complete before I go to the second interview. Police stations? Creepy. Lineups in police stations? Very creepy. The gibbering wacko in front of me who smelled like Doritos and armpits, who insisted on talking to me for the forty-minute wait despite the fact that I can’t understand questions like “Duh a fuh muh gih fluh fuh guh like guh?” and despite the fact that I was very ostentatiously listening to my MP3 player? Do I need to say it? After I got done there I could smell his secondhand reek on my coat as if he’d been spraying it from a bottle. Like Anti-Febreze.

But at least that was one thing accomplished. I decided to reward myself by buying lunch at the Vietnamese place in Bow Valley 3. “Numbah eleven!” Yeah yeah, number eleven. I took the little cup of spring-roll sauce, covered the noodles in all the condiments they had at the counter, grabbed a couple of napkins, closed the container… and fumbled it directly into my open purse.

Of course, my lunch upchucked all over everything and the little cup of spring-roll sauce, since the stuff has about the viscosity of water, burst like a balloon. So now no lunch, my celphone and MP3 player are soaked, my planner and wallet are dripping, the forms I needed to fax into Alberta Environment are illegible, the two DVDs I need to return to Blockbuster are stuck to the walls of the bag, my inhaler is clogged with fish sauce, my gloves are wadded balls of smelly cotton. The plastic-wrapped pack of Kleenex? Dry as a bone. And of course, since I finished Harry Harrison’s ‘Winter in Eden’ and Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘King, Queen, Knave’ yesterday, my reading schedule is free and I had decided to start a new book today because I thought I might be stuck in line. So ‘Ender’s Game’? Soaked. (I’m so sorry, Corey. I will buy you a new copy tomorrow and I will be sure to get the same edition.)

I ate two tiny pieces of spring roll that had miraculously balanced on top of my wallet and went out onto 5th Ave to empty my rice-noodle-chili-and-vinegar-stinking purse into a garbagecan, hungry and cranky and honestly on the verge of tears. At home, I bucked up temporarily with some peanut-butter crackers, a Wagon Wheel, cuppa, and nap in that order. When I woke up I decided to go out for groceries because my fridge, come on, man cannot live by condiments and tea alone.

The walk to Safeway seemed to go all right, though I was staring suspiciously around myself the entire way. (Because on a day like today? Don’t turn your back on nothing.) I double-checked my eggs to make sure they were good ones. I fingered every single apple in the display. I stared down each aisle for thirty seconds just in case someone had spilled an invisible yet deadly pool of canola oil in which I might slip and die. And I had almost reached my apartment building when I realized that the coolness down my left pantsleg wasn’t caused by the wind. Yeah, the eggs were fine - but can you believe I picked up a fucking leaky milk. Brand-new jeans, dark wash. My sock had been dyed blue.

That was when things began to get funny again. Because as I was standing at my door jabbing my keys at the lock and cursing the icy milk dripping down my leg, I noticed that management had stuck a notice on the doorknob:

Haha! Hahahaha! Awesome! Well, that got me out of cleaning the tub, right? I have decided to spend Wednesday at Chinook - I think I’ll eat one of those huge sticky cinnamon buns at the food court, try on some makeup at Sephora, maybe watch ‘10,000 BC,’ go stroke the kittens at Petsmart. Ha! I could tell people I spent the day stuffing my face and playing with pussy. Radical. (I think I was getting a little hysterical.)

I dumped my wet jeans in the wash (no doubt staining everything else in the basket, I haven’t checked yet) and cobbled together a kind of spinach-eggs-cheese quiche thing for supper, which was seriously the high point of the day (I actually photographed it). After supper I decided to make sugar cookies using the frozen dough I had thriftily set aside from my Christmas baking. Hey, guess what? If you wrap your dough in clingwrap rather than foil, it may pick up undesirable flavours from other items in the freezer! I guess I need to watch more Martha Stewart! I bet she covers that in a couple of shows! Hahaha!

As you can tell, the baked cookies tasted like vanilla and salmon.

I had to throw them out.

That was about an hour ago. I have no idea what else can go wrong in the eight minutes left today, but maybe if I stay very still here in front of the computer, singing quietly along to the Rolling Stones and quietly drinking water and composing tomorrow’s to-do list, maybe, just maybe I can escape the notice of whatever malevolent god I pissed off. Or maybe I’m pissing him off just by sitting here and in two seconds I’m going to spill water into my keyboard. Oh bloody Christ. I’m going to bed. I hope I don’t fall in the shower and fracture my skull.

Shout-out to the Dartboard for bringing this to my attention, for it rightly deserves the attention it’s getting. It’s the hottest thing I’ve ever seen. Or the worst. (I haven’t quite made up my mind yet, but I’ve watched it eight times already.)

Unrelated but too lazy to write another post: will everybody just shut up about the Spitzer thing already? If two consenting adults want to involve some benjamins in their sexual relations, who cares? What they should be focusing on is how using public money to hire a ho is a moral failing - not the hiring itself. Bluh.

Unrelated to both of the above: there is a post coming up about these bizarre boxes I keep finding in my apartment. While (whilst?) looking for a pair of needlenosed pliers the other day, I came across a couple of boxes similar to the one I dissected and posted about earlier. I cannot emphasize enough how much I do not remember making these boxes - I mean, choosing the specific items that went into each box. It’s actually a little alarming.

Like a lot of women, I feel sufficient hatred towards my body to try to reduce it in size, shrink it, make bits of it disappear… whatever you want to call weight loss. But guess what? My body doesn’t like it. It feels marginalized and hurt by my feelings towards it, by the way I deprecate it and punish it and insult it. I would too. It’s like a close friend telling me to just go away forever.

With that in mind, I happily contributed photos to a body-positive little video that’s getting a heady amount of attention from some prestigious body-acceptance types. I’m in it twice! You should watch it! - with the sound on, for the awesome song. It’s the feel-good PSA of the year. :-)

An e-mail I recently sent to someone whom I’m not sure considers me a friend gave me pause for thought (as well as a strong desire to invent a time machine so I could go back and grab my hand before I hit ’send,’ because daaaayum). Specifically, I started thinking about the different ways we communicate and how wildly different they are depending on the receiver. Communication as projectiles, if you will.

What I post here and on SodaCraze are generally sort of like… paper airplanes. They vary in shape and size but not substance, and they’re light and usually fun to look at (and fun to fold and throw) and it doesn’t matter who it hits, because of my lifetime mantra of ‘No harm, no foul.’

In my personal journal, it’s more like javelins: not too long and generally coming to a specific point.

In interviews, what I’m tossing are pretty much soap bubbles. Who doesn’t love bubbles? They look really nice in the air, they feel cool when they pop. But blow enough of them and you have to start hyperventilating to get enough air.

There’s a friend who usually gets what I’m going to have to call lightning strikes. We care intensely about each other, every time we talk one of us ends up saying “Well that’s why I love you, fuckaahhhhh,” but we are absolutely incapable of sending messages that don’t hurt each other, much the same way that lightning never improves anything it hits (except for Captain Marvel, obviously). Even his ‘fun’ stories and my ‘what I did this weekend’ stories send us into uncontrollable rages that make it impossible to communicate for days at a time. And this kid, I really do love him, and vice-versa, but we don’t have any bluntness when it comes to each other; it’s all edges.

There’s another friend who regularly gets darts - they look pretty harmless, and they’re fun, but there’s often a little bit of weight behind them. And the most important thing about darts is that you can’t just throw them at anything: there has to be a dartboard involved. So whenever I get a handful of darts, he gets them all, because he’s the only dartboard I know as well as the only recipient who would ever, ever get the joke.

My brother generally gets basketballs - I never throw him anything he can’t catch - whereas my closest friends get pingpong balls, which look easy to catch but are generally moving deceptively fast. (Also, they make a silly noise when they bounce off things, and they can get stuck in ceiling joists. But that has less to do with the metaphor.)

My mother only recently figured out how to “use the e-mails,” so what I send her are necessarily simple things, things that are strictly catchable, much like Koosh balls.

Another good friend usually gets a caber - they don’t come very often, but they’re looooong and kind of showy. (And once or twice he’s had to dodge them, screaming in fear.)

In school debates I found myself drawing on my massive ore deposits of random articles, useless trivia, overeducation, unlikely conjecture, and fallacious logic to produce thermonuclear devices which would be deployed at the very end of the discussion, but constituted an absolute end to it. Seriously, sometimes I’ve detonated these things and listened in misery as the talk pattered to a stop. “So… uh… well, I guess that’s that then.” “Sorry.”

Anyway, I’m going to go eat another Wagon Wheel, then iron a sports coat. How do you communicate with the people in your life?

Aaaand I’m back. Calgary feels lonely and dreary and my apartment seems wee compared to the big pink house at Kingsview Pointe. But I made the most of my couple of days in Edmonton, I reckon. One day was spent browsing Whyte Ave in the company of a gentleman of whom I’d had a much higher opinion prior to this:

Cretinous little asstard beat me at thirteen consecutive games of pool (I think - by the end I was too mad to keep count) and the last three he was playing with one hand to ‘give me a chance.’ Next time I see him I’m gonna kneecap him with a pool cue. And that’s the last time that I assume that someone who likes karate, curling, and fishing doesn’t like city-boy pursuits. It turns out small-town boys play a lot of pool.

The next day was my mom’s birthday dinner at Tropika, where I consumed everything within a ten-metre radius and questioned my mother incessantly about whether I was in the will or not, since she’d had surgery on Monday and, well, I thought her health could go at any minute. Girl’s gotta plan for her future, you know. Then after that I went to my pal Blonde’s house for dinner and cheesecake, followed by ‘The Other Boleyn Girl’ (not my usual type of movie, and as predicted I didn’t like it, but she’d read the book and was so excited to see it that I couldn’t ask to see something else).

Then on Saturday there was the Welcome-Back Debacle at Casa Gordon/LeBlanc, which included (as promised) a glass of Goldschlager to celebrate a friend of mine publishing his second book:

So much beard! I’m surprised their cheeks didn’t start a fire.

And so much grope! I’m surprised… actually, I’m not surprised. (PS. I didn’t notice till now that Dave came back with that dark of a tan. You know, New Zealand doesn’t have such an awesome ozone layer. You’ve probably got ten kinds of skin cancer… get a volunteer to check you for unusual moles right away!)

And finally, a picture of ladies. Goddammit, why do these glasses give me such a case of crazy-eye?

Followed by brunch at the St. Albert Inn the morning after. I gotta say, they had some fiiine eats at the breakfast buffet - it can be hard to keep bacon really crunchy in those domed chafing dishes, but they found a way. All in all, a good trip with minimal parental craziness; and Solange, I promise I won’t call you Big Spoon any more. ;-)