We had a sad end of Thanksgiving – my family dog died quite suddenly on Sunday. She was a lovely dog, really just the best dog you ever met. We got her when I was eleven, and she was three months old and very fluffy. For the longest time we couldn’t think what to call her – we called her Porcupine as a placeholder nickname, and my mother finally came up with Nora. Nora was extraordinarily beautiful if difficult to capture in photographs (but here’s a picture of her anyway), and even when she was an old dowager dog, she still mostly acted like a scampery playful puppy. We are rather forlorn without her.
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My sister says it is funny to behold me when I am ill (because I rarely am). She says I get all What is this uncomfortable feeling I am feeling, this unpleasant pain-like experience that is happening to me? I do not recognize it but I am confident I do not like it. So when I get allergies, WHICH ARE NOT A REAL SICKNESS BUT JUST MY IMMUNE SYSTEM ACTING A FOOL, I feel extraordinarily resentful. I have had allergies the past few days, peaking on Saturday, and these are the strategies I have tried to get rid of them:
1. Complaining really loudly to myself in my apartment as I fling Kleenex in the direction of the trash bins (“UNHAPPY. UNHAPPY. UNHAPPY.”)
2. Implementing the same basic trouble-shooting process I use with crying babies; which is to say, I fed me, wrapped me up in blankets, gave me toys to play with (books and then cross-stitching and West Wing), and finally as a last resort put me down for a nap.
3. Taking very small doses of Benadryl. Bigger doses make me unfit to drive.
4. Acquiring local honey and putting it in my coffee. Remember how I said I hate honey? (And honey mustard and honey in tea and honey baked ham/turkey/chicken and anything with honey.) I hate allergies more. Local honey cures allergies and I will have it in my coffee or spread on bread or in my ramen noodles or anything as long as it gets rid of my allergies.
5. Ordering my immune system to knock it off (“There is nothing wrong! You lymphowhateverthings that fancy yourselves Paul Revere can go back inside! Save it for an actual germ, my God!”). I know, it’s pretty cutting, and may hurt my immune system’s feelings. But I think when my immune system goes on red alert in reaction to blooming ligustrum (that’s privet to our neighbors across the pond) or cane burning or whatever, it has earned a sharp reproof.
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TEASER TUESDAYS asks you to:
A while ago, I bought an unreasonable number of books at our university’s book bazaar. I took that entire day off work just to buy that unreasonable number of books, the first day I had taken off work in five months. And of all the books I bought that I hadn’t read before, I have only since then read one of them. And I didn’t think much of it.
I find it strange that the book I picked to read was Elizabeth Gilbert’s Stern Men, all about lobster fishing, a subject that holds little to no interest to me. I believe I was thinking I would start it, get bored, and post it on PaperbackSwap, and the whole process would feel cleansing. But so far it is quite enjoyable, and so for Teaser Tuesdays I say unto you:
Why was her mother such a china shop in the first place?…Ruth was used to women like the Pommeroy sisters, who strode through life as though they were invincible.