not dead yet

I took today off from work, as I was weak and frail like a kitten from the flu. Also, my head was pounding its way out of the tops and sides of my skull, which made it difficult to think.

Fortunately, it turns out that a rigorous schedule of sleeping, moaning, drinking licorice tea, and moaning myself back to sleep is pretty effective in getting me back into fighting trim. So I feel almost mostly better now that it is almost mostly time to fall back into bed, and I can hope to feel pretty tolerable by morning.

Or I'll have a complete reversal and lose my voice by morning. Which also sometimes happens.

During my sojourn at home, I was reminded of what life was like when I did this every day, when I was a poor, wretched freelance editor, eking a wage out of inserting the serial commas and deleting the rampant, unnecessary apostrophes that sadly litter today's romance novel manuscripts.

I didn't do much but drive to the post office and grocery store every day, drive back home, and turn the blinding white pages of the latest missive from Pern with my trusty red pencil by my side.

Some days, I would take a walk around the neighborhood, taking very bad photographs of leaves and things, muttering insensibly to myself about all the great things I was gonna do someday, and how much I loved this "lifestyle."

This crippling isolation, my friends, is what led me to blog in the first place. Please don't make me go back there again. It is a dark, dark place.

So yes, I puttered about the house for most of today, when I wasn't sleeping, or moaning -- no wait, I think I did manage some simultaneous moan-walking -- watched a little PBS, realized that my tearing up at the intro music and montage for American Experience was probably a sign of mental decay, or at least a high fever, but something about it is all so reminiscent of my early teenage years, which were all mixed up with swelling, surging John Williams soundtracks, Indiana Jones fantasies, the music from Epcot Center (I owned the album) and more re-readings of Jane Eyre and Little Women that I could possibly make you understand...

So I love PBS, right? We all know this. And they're in the midst of a mostly awful but highly watchable series of Jane Austen-based flicks this month (Northanger Abbey, Good; Persuasion, Not Bad; Mansfield Park, Perfectly Atrocious; Miss Austen Regrets, Don't Even Get Me Started...) And I'm in a bit of a feeble mental state just now, right? Maybe just a little emotionally vulnerable, perhaps a tad excessively open to sentiment.

But tell me you don't clap your hands with joy at the last part of this final scene from Northanger Abbey.

Should I go back to moaning? I think I'll just go back to moaning.