I am having an unkind body day today. I stood in front of my closet, pondering what to wear for no less than half an hour (ok, it was really fifteen minutes, but still, could there be a more unproductive way to spend precious minutes of my life? I think not). I tried on five different pairs of pants, including the new ones that I just bought on Saturday and found them all to be unsatisfactory and uncomfortable. The new ones don’t fit. Older ones don’t fit. There was one pair that fit fine but used to be loose. I even put on a pair of my old track pants, the ones that I have to fold over at the waist two times and found that I only had to fold once. I rejected them, however, because I refuse to go to work in FAT PANTS. It occurs to me that I am slowly morphing into a woman toad. Seriously… the fun pillows have definitely gotten larger and my midsection definitely thicker because apparently, the Operation Hottie pounds are starting to creep back on. Not so much creep but stomp in wearing big twelve-lace Doc Martens, parting the fat like a Red Sea made of gelatin. (Because of their “resistant to fat” stamp on the bottom! Oh, it makes me laugh! It does! And I am the only one! Note to self: stop making jokes that need explanation.)
I blame The Knee. The Knee is somewhat vengeful about any walking I attempt. It will swell up and ache and generally be stiff for several days after any sportyness whatsoever. I also should probably blame things like my key lime bars and also eating chocolate and barbecue last week. And also, the new Strawberry and Cr’me Sbux frappuchinos, which have literally 600 calories, even without the whipped cream. And that is just wrong, because they taste so very good. Of course, I didn’t discover this until two of them had gone down my gullet in one week’s time, but now, they are on the verboten list. They are good, but certainly not worth feeling like El Toadus Diablo.
Oh, of course I know that an extra five pounds doesn’t make me a Weeble, but still, it is just disappointing. To make matters worse, my lips have had their weird allergic reaction thing again. I don’t even know what caused it this time, although I’m starting to suspect that it’s my Prescriptives Lip Gloss or the Aveda Lip Saver combined with a little too much sun on my lips (see below). So, now they are red and puffy, looking like a post-injection Melanie Griffith. I can’t imagine why anyone would pay to have this done… my already impressive pout feels like it’s practically jumping off my face at this point. I feel as though I’m walking around, waiting to be kissed and kissed often, by someone who knows how.
Perchance, Adam Baldwin?
Deep dark confession time: I have had a 20-year crush on Adam Baldwin. Seriously, it’s pathetic. He was in My Bodyguard with Chris Makepeace (who, in my opinion, should have stopped at Meatballs… wait, for all intents and purposes, he did) and I was all over that brooding quiet guy thing. He was misunderstood, of course. And also, linebackery salty goodness. Pretty much my life at age 11 would have been complete had sexy bully with a heart of gold Adam Baldwin asked me to couple’s skate to the stylings of one REO Speedwagon (“I Can’t Fight This Feeling”).
To be clear, this is a different crush than my Russell Crowe fixation. Russell Crowe is my pretend boyfriend. Adam Baldwin is how I will get back at Russell for being a fooking wankah. Adam Baldwin is my pretend one night stand.
For many many nights.
Many hot, sweaty, prolonged, multiple nights.
Involving possibly props.
Hmmmm…..What was I saying again?
Oh yeah, so imagine my delight when he appeared on the waning Angel episodes! I squeed and then I ran to IMDB to confirm that yes, it was the guy who had two lines in Independence Day (and still managed to make my ovaries swell) and was the star of a majority of my pre-sleep mind movies from December 1981 through June 1984 (when we began the short-lived Bruce Springsteen fixation). I am very much hoping that he’ll end up naked at some point on the series. It’s not much of a hope, but a girl’s got to dream.
Oh, Adam Baldwin…. I’ll bet you taste good.
Speaking of trout lips, there’s more news about the scary Snakehead fish.
I could have lived my entire life without ever needing to know that fish have tongues. Why… why do they need tongues? Why??? Are they French kissing each other? Do they gossip? Are the snakefish fry getting them pierced to rebel against their parents? It just makes no sense! Darwin, please explain to me why fish need tongues so that I don’t have nightmares about snakefish dressing up on the weekend and performing in KISS revival bands.
My wannabe bronchitis has been trying its darnedest to earn a permanent guest starring role in the double feature that is my lungs. I have been fighting this with juice, water, and more juice. I’m a big fan of the juice cure, which I invented. It involves drinking yummy juice and feeling smug. I have yet to find an easier cure-all.
However, with the warmer than normal spring weather, my allergies kicked on a little earlier and thus this has fueled the fire (with phlegm!) and the bronchitis is beginning to tip the scales. I would like to stay away from the doctor if at all possible, because I start to feel like a hypochondriac, with my knee and my wimpy lungs and the weird stupid ways I injure myself, so I scrounged around in my medicine cabinet and retrieved one remaining prednisone tablet from the last Zith/Pred session. Ah prednisone. My old foe.
I downed it on Monday. I sort of like taking Prednisone (especially in the beginning of a Pred run, before it starts storing up in my system and making me hate sleeping and food and life in general), because it zaps my appetite and I feel sort of peppy and bright for the entire day. However, for some reason, this particular single pill did weird things to my head. It made me sort of stupid, like I had been confusing lead paint chips for goldfish crackers as a child. I think it was the magical blend of the prednisone and also that I was freebasing on estrogen cocktails, but I was dull and listless and sloe-eyed and couldn’t concentrate to save my life. I went shopping with Penny and wasn’t my normal effervescent self. Then I went home and worked on a freelance project, then wandered into the bedroom and joined Esteban for some Tivo time.
Now, normally, I fall asleep by the middle of the first show. For instance, I think I’ve only seen the end of maybe three episodes of CSI. As for Good Eats, I have a bit more of an attention span (mostly because Alton Brown works that Thomas Dolby goofy sex appeal so well) but for the most part, I’m in a coma after forty-five minutes. However, this time, we watched until long after midnight (which happens when our bedroom clock says 12:44 am, because we are both broken and terribly paranoid about being late for work, however we now automatically subtract 44 minutes from the time without even thinking about it’ these silly brain games we play) until it was Esteban and not me that said ‘No mas no mas’ and begged to turn off the television.
Fine, I would just lie there. We were out of Ny-quil, the thick slurpy red river that my dreams travel on when my lungs go wispy and filled with cotton. I haven’t wanted to buy more. Esteban thinks already that I take a ridiculous amount of Ny-quil. He worries about this. He does not think about the fact that each dose is one of those little cups and thus a whole bottle of Nyquil is probably only six doses. He is always worrying about something. It is his job, he says, to worry about me, like some bearded mother hen. He should probably be right to worry but I do only take it when it will be impossible to sleep through the wheezing. It’s not even a struggle to breathe that keeps me awake, it’s the whee whee whee whee banshees howling in my chest.
But I was out of the Ny-quil, so I instead tried to hypnotize myself asleep and kept huffing on the albuterol. Except that was not even the problem that night. No, instead, my mind was racing and I made it through three different whole plots of mind movies before I realized that sleep was no closer than it had been two hours ago. This was crap. I’m a big fan of sleep. In fact, I’m head cheerleader on Sleep’s varsity squad. I tried another position. And another. Esteban snored, then talked in his sleep about mushrooms and flannel and hijackers (which all go together so rationally) then kicked his feet, shuffling a waltz between the sheets, modified box step that signifies that he’s still a little bit anemic (that’s a symptom, by the way, of anemia’ restless feet.) until it was utterly impossible and I was mentally planning to buy another bed to stick in my office when the damn thing gets finished, and I don’t want to hear any kvetching from Esteban either. Suddenly, even buying a tony Pottery Barn day bed complete with the posh twin sized pillow top to match our own seems like the best investment in the world. I got up and choked down some Vicodin cough syrup, stuff which is so vile and nasty that each time I am desperate enough to take a dose, I think that it had to be some kind of mistake at the pharmacy and really I must be swallowing ear drops or perhaps a fungal ointment, because nothing but nothing that was meant to go in your mouth should taste that nasty. Nothing.
The clock kept showing me ridiculous times. 1:49. 3:00. 3:37. 4:01. Am I dreaming that I am awake? Perhaps lying here is just as good, or at least half as good as actually being asleep. Finally, I got up, went to the bathroom, got another drink of water, and sat in the ugly beige recliner in the living room. I didn’t rock because the recliner squeaks. I sat there and stared out the beveled glass front door until the window becomes a purple bruise and then the stone in a mood ring going from despair to sad to neutral and I could see the baffled shadow of the house across the street. I got back up and figured that for certain I would fall asleep now. That’s always the way of it with insomnia. You finally fall into a deep restful sleep about an hour before your alarm is scheduled to go off. Except that I didn’t. I slept off and on in fifteen minute stretches, finally giving up and showering a half an hour before the alarm was scheduled to go off.
I stumbled into work, sipping on a venti frappuchino and then a large diet Coke. Nothing. Around 10 am, I hit the wall. My eyes became the holes you punch in cardboard to safely view eclipses. I couldn’t concentrate. I started to feel dizzy and nauseated. One of my two teammates was out sick and the other one, when I murmured something about not sleeping all night and how I was thinking of going home at noon, hissed ‘Oh you have GOT to be kidding, leaving me here all alone?’ Yeah, because I’m so valuable to you as a walking zombie. Whatever. I could stick it out. I could stay upright. I just couldn’t do that and also think.
At lunch, I stumbled out to my car, barely steering my way to the lovely little park down by the river. On my way, I saw a raven fly over the top of my car with some kind of rodent that squeaked and squealed. Was that a dream? Was I hallucinating now? It was a beautiful day out, unseasonably warm, sunny and in the low 70’s. I parked at the end of the park, about fifty feet off the water, locked my doors, turned on NPR, opened the sunroof, then the powerseat sank down into oblivion. I grabbed my jacket from the backseat, wadded it under my head and flipped the hood up over my eyes. Then I just sat there that way, feeling the sun bake through the open roof, the gentle strains of Handel and the sound of the river at high tide lulling me to sleep. Somewhere along the way, I would catch myself drifting off and jolt back awake, certain that someone was coming, someone would see me prone in my car and think that I was a suicide or something. After a little while after maintaining that tenuous grasp between sleep and awake, I started noticing that my synesthesia was showing itself and how different music was different streams of material. The Mozart was a ribbon of white bridal silk, sewn with pearls. The Offenbach was spider web strands and insulation fibers mixed with silver Christmas tree tinsel. The Debussy was a bolt of clouded velvet, first purple then black then blue then scarlet. And then before I knew it, they were announcing the 12:30 quiz question and I knew that I had to get back or I would receive nasty glances from my already petulant coworker, and also I had sunburned my lips, which were ow.
I pushed the button that would return the seat back to its right position and saw a cloud of white on the water. Geese? Tundra swans?
The pelicans were back!
A fleet of pelicans, each with a snowy body and bright yellow beaks. They cruised the river in synchronized perfection, each dipping their heads below the surface at precisely the same time. The pelicans were back. I had heard that they showed up last summer for the first time since Green Bay has stopped piping polluted sludge into the river, and had seen them in the air, but I had never seen them so close, so graceful, so in the act of being pelicans.
They swirled around in a little cluster, homing in on what must have been a school of fish underfoot, then all at once dipped their heads below the surface, their legs kicking and then popped back up and gulped in rapid succession one two three four five six seven eight nine throats swallowed their catch and let the water roll down their necks. Then they did a figure eight and as if it were planned, popped down all at once again for an encore performance. Again and again, they scoured along the park’s edge, all clustered closely together, all turning in perfect unison for an unbeatable Esther Williams tribute. I wanted to laugh and cry all at once because it was so beautiful, so perfect, so funny and lovely and pelicany all at once.
Needless to say, it’s been the best thing I’ve seen all week.
