Oh god, I hope not.
But it would figure.
See, I’m not feeling very good right now. It’s my usual suite of symptoms. Sore throat, headache, raw feeling in my lungs, mild dizziness and disorientation. Brain fog is a bit thicker and clingier than usual. My teeth hurt,
And I will be heading to Xmas dinner in an hour and a half or so. So, yay.
I am hoping that food, hydration, and my usual sinus unclogging measures can bring me back to life enough to go with Joe to Xmas Dinner at his parents’ place.
Missing that due to ill health would be almost infinitely depressing.
I mean, if I am truly sick, I shouldn’t go. Joe’s parents are quite old and I would hate for them to catch something from me, the sad waif they take in once a year.
But if it’s just the odd syndrome I get now and then, with no clear and definite sign of infection that doesn’t clear up once I am fed and watered, I can go.
And I want to go. It’s a highlight of the year for me. It’s always me, Joe, Joe’s sister Melanie, and his parents, and then me as their sole guest.
And not only are they lovely hosts for little old me, they are all highly intelligent and engaging conversationalists as well, and that makes me feel positively spoiled.
And I really like that feeling. Makes me feel all warm inside.
So I am going to do my best to patch myself up and get better so I can enjoy myself for the evening in a way that actually involves other people.
Ones I don’t even live with! Oh my. How very.
The water is already making me feel somewhat better. That’s a good sign, n’est-ce pas?
On the plus side of things, my mother called, and it always does me good to hear her voice. Reminds me that I am not entirely cut off from my origins.
There has to be some way to get back in touch and stay in touch with my siblings and my mother. I miss them all so much.
Got some family news. Apparently my Uncle Jim lives all alone and has become even more bitter and cynical.
The latest is that he doesn’t believe in Covid. Thinks it’s no worse than the flu and people are blowing things out of proportion and all that crap.
Add that to the fact that he sometimes calls up my mother, his (much) older sister, just to rag on and mock something he knows she loves, and a picture forms.
He’s got Ingrown Personality Syndrome, and as far as I know, there is no cure.
The name I gave it comes from the way it makes an isolated person turn inward and become ever more bitter and resentful while cloaking themselves in a deepening sense of dark superiority while becoming increasingly incapable of behaving like a human being at all.
It’s like an addiction to the sour sense of smugness that comes from cynicism, and it’s irreversible because it feeds upon itself.
The patient is fouling their own nest with this toxic insularity, and this causes them pain. But their ego won’t let them see that they are the source of their own pain, so instead they blame the world, and project their pain onto chosen scapegoats, and turn even further away from the world and their own humanity.
Which causes even more pain, and so on and so forth.
I’ve lost two friends to it. It’s devastating.
On the other hand, my sister Catherine just returned from Tanzania where she was part of the Canadian delegation to the World Economic Forum.
Next step President of Earth, obviously.
Well I think I am alive enough to make it to dinner. Knock on wood.
More after the break.
An inch of white snow
Dinner was fine. More or less.
Food, wine, and conservation where are in abundance and I feel quite good all through the festivities. That is a drastic improvement about previous Xmass where I had to wade through deep puddles of social anxiety before I could get myself calmed down enough enough to relax and enjoy myself.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that while I was there, first my thumb went numb and tingly and then my next finger and the middle finger started to join it.
I was able to bend and rub and twist the feeling back into my digits and beinf things back to mostly normal.
But then my right jaw went numb and I had to force that area back into life to behave all oved again again .
Then it seemed like I was doing OK-ish. Until I sat down and tried to write only to find that it is very difficult to words make the making on the pages.
So writing has been much harder than usual. Hopefully, this is entirely because i am very tired because of my being way busier than usual, and not because I have head another TIA or ten and I am teetering on the edge of a big time full blown stroke.
I guess only time will tell. I know that what I probably should have done is go straight to the ER once I started getting number. That would be the smart thing to do.
But I did not want to interrupt my lovely evening and so I didn’t say anything to anyone about any of it and just hopes it wasn’t a suicidally stupid thing to do.
Once I am done here, I am going to go take my clothes off, crawl into bed, go the hell to sleep, and hopefully wake up feeling a lot better.
If not… if I am in fact worse off… I will have to go to the god damned ER.
Oh well. At least I will have my tablet this time. That should make things way easier,. especially if I end being admitted.
Hope I see you tomorrow.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.