Ode to Giardia
March 28, 2009
So this, I thought, is what it feels like to die.
As you may or may not know (and unless you’re Bethany or Jenn, you probably don’t) I’ve been doing battle with a delightful little parasite named Giardia for the past two months. I’ve known for only two weeks, however, that Giardia was the culprit. After a month and a half of intestinal woe and symptoms far too nasty and, for lack of a better term, fecal, to share, I hit up the doctor’s office and had a grand span of diagnostics–blood and various other materials–run. I was actually relieved when they came back with a tangible reason for my misery, and slightly amused that for two months I’ve never been without a team of little friends, chillaxin in my lower gut. And hey look! They’re even kinda cute!
Giardia!
The cure was simple: take 4 caps of a little antibiotic called Tindamax, one time, and you’re good to go. I clicked my heels and downed the 2 mg panacea, expecting soon to be cured. My amusement at my tagteam of microscopic friendies continued ’til roughly Wednesday night, when I started feeling B-A-D.
Somehow I dragged myself to an hour of punishing Power Yoga at Samadhi Yoga Studio with Jenn, then we cooked a lovely dinner that included my patented caramelized onion, apple, goat cheese and arugula pizza. Despite knowing that for the benefit of my parasites I must now be essentially vegan, I had a little bit of pizza and a glass of lovely peach wine. Bad. Idea. This, I believe, was the beginning of the end.
Flash to yesterday: so exhausted I felt like I was moving underwater and every blink took effort; shaking, shivering with cold, then tearing off my clothes from overheatedness; rolling nausea, aching eyes, and all mucous membranes (use your imagination here, kids); dizziness, headache, and deep aching in all of my large joints and muscles (but, to be fair, I know not whether to attribute these last symptoms to the power yoga or to my mysterious illness). Needless to say, I bagged on the gym again last night and came home to call the doctor and fall into bed at 7p.m., sleeping through until 11 this morning. This is so. not. normal.
After hacking up applesauce and a visit to the clinic this afternoon which included a panoply of other bloodwork, I’m home and still completely wiped. The doctor is nearly 100% sure that the degree of horrible I’m currently experiencing is not because of the Giardia, but in fact the fault of the antibiotic! It turns out that the cure is often far worse than the ailment.
Jesus, I’m lame. I just hope that I recover enough this weekend to go to work on Monday and be ready for a Retrospective event on Tuesday night (more on that to come). Sadly, I’ll need to play PR girl and look camera and video-ready for that, so it may or may not happen. Bah.
For the time being, it’s more bed for me, and for the next few months nothing but whole grains, vegetables, fruit and soy protein. Goddamn, I’m gonna miss me some dairyz. ):
Protected: Part the Third: The After Party, or, Confessions
February 14, 2009
Protected: Part The Second: Birthday Fetes, or, a Prelude
February 6, 2009
Protected: Part The First: We Meet Again, Batman, or, Setting The Stage: The past revived
February 1, 2009
Relics, II
December 13, 2008
It is 12 a.m. when you come home drunk. You stumble in the door, heeltoe off yellow flats and drop bags, heading without real hope to the kitchen table. If there were mail, it would be here.
There are two things you are expecting: the first comes in a plain, white envelope, bearing ill tidings from the land of standardized tests. The second you do not truly believe will materialize from the West Coast, but if it did, it would hold a number of things left behind when you flew away five months before. Tonight there are no standard white envelopes on the table, but there is a package. High and brown, it stands shady in the dark. You flick on the Christmas tree–overhead lights are not right for this, nor for tired, dilated eyes–already half knowing its origins, half repining its sender.
The letters on the “sent from” side of the packing label, lashed on with messy, crisscrossing skeins of tape, are light and scarcely legible. There is an unfamiliar area code, handwriting you do not recognize. You are perplexed; perhaps it is not for you at all, but a mistaken delivery to an affable neighbor. But then you make out a “G” printed beneath “sender.” With some amusement, you realize it is in fact only his letters, not his numbers–surprisingly neat–that you recognize. There was never any reason for you to get his numbers; he called you first.
You gaze down at the package, sober. There is finality here, some sort of end you’ve been telling yourself you need for weeks now, but which in the end you are not certain you want. Part of you has been hoping for a Christmas miracle. Part of you has always been an expectant child. But here they are–your gifts, from and for you–arrived 13 days early. Everyone knows that Christmas miracles do not happen early, and they do not happen to you.
There will be no one at your door step, no personal delivery, and no happy serendipity, this package seems to say. You do not live in a novel or a movie or a tidy, happy dream. This you should know by now. This you should accept. Wake up, tiny Who-girl, and grow a nose–or at the very least a viable dream.
By the light of the twinkling tree lights you gut the parcel, slicing through the last thing he touched, brushing against invisible fingerprints. It is the closest thing you will get to holding hands. Inside the package there are three shining Christmas tree bulbs from Goodland, Kansas, a bathing suit, a strange, new copy of a movie you like–a copy that never belonged to you. Perhaps all the gifts are not your own, and you do not know why. And then there is a small note with only 7 words, a single frownie face
Sorry.
PS: Still looking for your earrings.
There is a deep yawn in you, a creaky, aching opening that threatens, for a second, to overtake. You begin to cry, but stop. You will not let his letters do a number on you.
By the dim warm light of the Christmas tree you hang the bulbs upon overburdened boughs. Green, blue, gold, they are all in various stages of cracked hilarity. Peeling and unseemly, luxurious and fine, they are a symbol of something that you do not know–perhaps of all the foolish notions you had about what a future might have been like in which you spent all your Christmases holding his hand.
“Sorry,” it says. But sorry for what?
You stand back to regard your work. The three new ornaments are out of place, strangely wrong on the tree that has been decorated now for a week. In an act of humbleness, perhaps of apology, you remove the bulbs and nest them like three delicate baby birds back in the box, flicking off the lights as you go. You bear the box upstairs, sit down with it in your lap, do not cry. Stare. Finally, you shove the box between the desk and the bureau, draping a tee shirt, a bag, a large file folder over it.
Some cracked and golden things must remain in the dark.
Oooh! Wait! Two more! Because I can’t get enough LM quotes!
December 4, 2008
Again. Anagrams. It’s a wonderful, bewildering, poignant novel.
By this point we’re all aware that I’m obsessed and sing praises of this woman and her work quite frequently to the moon. As if you needed more fodder, more reason to get out and buy a book, here are three more Moore snippets. I don’t think I have to explain why I love them so much–though I am no longer nearly as bereft as Benna.
“I was not large enough for Gerard. I was small, lumpy, anchored with worry, imploded. He didn’t want me, he wanted Macy’s; like Aeneas or Ulysses, he wanted the anonymity and freedom to wander purchaseless from island to island. I could not be enough of the world for him. A woman could never be enough of the world, I thought, though that was what a man desired of her, though she flap her arms frantically trying.” (35)
And:
“It was like some principle of physics: Things flowed naturally back and forth between the two apartments until the maximum level of chaos was reached. I had his can opener, but he had my ice-cube trays. It was as if our possessions were embarked upon some osmotic, conjugal exchange, a giant french kiss of personal effects, which had somehow left us behind.” (35)
And one more. I swear it’s the last for a goodly while!
“He also had a habit of charging after small animals and frightening them. Actually, the first time he did this it was with a bird in the park, and I laughed, thinking it hilarious. Later, I realized, it was weird: Gerard was thirty-one and charging after small mammals, sending them leaping into bushes, up trees, over furniture. He would then turn and grin, like a charmed maniac, a Puck with a Master’s degree. He liked also to water down the face and neck fur of cats and dogs, smoothing it back with his palms, like a hairdresser, saying it made them look like Judy Garland. I realized that life was too short for anyone honestly and thoroughly to outgrow anything, but it was clear that some people were making more of an effort than others.” (19)
Lorrie Moore–if ever you read this whilst Google searching your name–I thoroughly, completely, totally admire you. If you need boots licked, children wet-nursed, dogs walked or help moving heavy kitchen applicances, I’m here and I’m willing. Lugging your fridge? It would be an honor.
Lorrie Mooreisms
December 4, 2008
This is the quote I ought to have posted for Thanksgiving. It (and the beautiful snippets that follow) are, in general, more gems from Lorrie Moore, in particular, from a novel called Anagrams. Here, the protagonist, Benna, watches her daughter repeat Thanksgiving grace and ponders children, the past and gratitude.
“You cannot be grateful without possessing a past. That is why children are incapable of gratitude and why night prayers and dinner graces are lost on them. “Gobbles Mommy, Gobbles Grandpa…” George races through it. She has no reference points. As I get older the past widens and accumulates, all sloppy landlessness like a river, and as a result I have more clearly demarcated areas of gratitude. Things like ice cream or scenery or one good kiss become objects of huge soulful thanks. Nothing is gobbled. This is a sign of getting old.” (116)
This is a particular favorite of mine. It hurt the first time I read it; I identified. I didn’t necessarily want to. I loved it all the same. This one is thought/spoken by Benna, too.
“Words, I think, words are all you need for love–you say them and then just for the hell of it your heart rises and spills over into them. My idea in a love affair is that if everyone makes enough declarations, one of them is bound to come true. Words are interesting that way.” (148)
And the last–which I appreciate, but certainly would have appreciated more ’round March of 2007 whilst penning ye olde undergrad thesis.
“How can she say that she has begun to think that all writing about art is simply language playing so ardently with itself that it goes blind?” (56)
Who can resist an invitation from a friendly banana?
December 4, 2008
On the TV downstairs teen stars are enthusiastically butchering Christmas carols. Upstairs the cats are howling and harrying one another into an epic feline grabass tourney, and here in my room, there is a weary-eyed dame dutifully sculpting Word docs of her own prose and smiling over a decidedly playful banana.
I don’t know who it was at Chiquita that decided bananas are playful, but I deeply appreciate his/her brainwave. Who, after all, could refuse this? C’mon, you cylindrical sweetmeat! you bauble of baboons! you tempting tropical tasty! Let’s play!
The precocious, curious, sniffing banana.
If you must know: yes, I just ate it. In an extremely manly, post-gym protein shake.
*Note: I am now back up to almost full pushup prowess! I project one more week until I can pump out the kinds of badass, Lady Hulkian sets I was doing this time last year in Spain. W00t!
