So yup. I’m sick.
Nose is running, though not as badly as it was last night.
Throat is scratchy and sore. Feels like I’ve been gargling gravel.
And I gave that up years ago.
The soreness extends all the way up through my eustachian tube into my ears, which is kind of weird. And a tad worrisome.
My lungs are sore and scratchy too. With a sort of hot feeling in them when I breathe.
And I do that all the time!
Muscle aches have shown up in full force, along with their good buddy stiffness.
And not the fun kind of stiffness. The kind that makes you feel like the Tin Man before Dorothy uses the oil can on him.
But by far the most annoying symptom is that goddamned malaise. I feel so very tired and dragged out.And there’s this persistent sense of something being wrong.
So yup. I’m a sickie all right.
Obviously I did not make it to Wound Care this morning. No need to expose a bunch of other sick people to whatever I’ve got.
An odd thing happened when I called to cancel the appointment.
The following is a summary reenactment.
“Hi, I’m afraid I can’t come in today, I’ve got the flu.”
“Oh, okay. We’ll cancel today’s appointment and you can see us for your next appointment on the 11th at 10:15 am.”
“Great, thanks! *hangs up*”
“Wait.. I never told her my name…”
So she had either vast psychic powers or Caller ID.
More after the break.
Going with my gut
It occurred to me recently that my writing process is mostly intuitive.
In a sense. I go mostly by how things feel to me.
it’s guided by my conscious mind and it’s the lower levels of my conscious mind that handle the tricky business of turning those intuitions into words.
But it all starts deep inside my soul. And when I am writing, like right now, I am rarely more than a couple word ahead in my conscious mind.
Like many, many writers before me have said, it almost feels like I am taking dictation from some deep inner voice.
This seems at odds with my hardcore rationalist materialist beliefs. But it’s not. For all my talk about logic in the past, my mighty intellect is also mostly intuitive.
It wasn’t that I never needed to study in school because I knew some secret memory techniques or had some fantastic way to study.
I just remembered it. No technique involved at all.
Going back to writing, I think the deeply intuitive nature of my process is a big part of why I find it almost impossible to go back to something I’ve written and revise and edit it.
It’s like trying to perform surgery on myself. I am too closely connected to my work to be able to take a dispassionate , clinical look at it like a editor must.
Everything I write is a part of me, and stays that way.
So I’m afraid I’ll have to leave the surgery to someone else.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.