08. 01. HAVING RETURNED

So I’ve been away at camp for the last four days, where they won’t let you sleep and only give you cheap beer to drink. I mean, honestly, out of all the things to spend their budget on, they shouldn’t be scrimping on alcohol. Anyway it’s good times all round, and somehow I survived the ordeal, so here I am. I guess it wouldn’t have been impossible to update with food from camp, but that would have involved lugging the camera around everywhere and also four days’ worth of backlog since the IT lounge there is always full. These did not seem like wise options to me so I passed. Then again, I guess I could have posted pictures from the post-movie drinking session I had last night, but by the time I got back home I was much too drunk-tired to do anything much but embrace my bed. I was pretty embarrassing in terms of the amount of alcohol it takes to make you feel like you’re going to get drunk soon, but I blame it on my lack of sleep and my near-lack of dinner. Anyway, the movie started out as an action crime thriller and ended up as a gay romance. I was flabbergasted. I did not disapprove. I was still flabbergasted, though. Also this weather is sucking all my stamina out of me. If there is so much moisture in the air, why does it feel that it is necessary to drain me of my moisture as well? Why can’t we just get along in our separate spheres? Please, air, leave me alone. Air conditioning is expensive this year.

07. 18. EXCUSES

Okay, let’s deal with the facts here — there’s no getting over two days’ worth of missed posts. Actually no, that’s a terrible way to begin because those are not actually the facts. There is totally a way, I could just look up some pictures online and backdate the whole shebang. But I won’t, because that is way too much work and I didn’t eat anything quite so interesting as to merit that level of dedication. So the past couple of days, to be exact for the past six days, I’ve been having this odd numbness on my left side. And as you know, anything one-sided is totally not a good sign in terms of symptoms. So I guess it was a relief of sorts that at times, my right hand or leg would go to sleep as well. But relief or not, there was strangeness, lo, and I was confused. I thought it might have been something to do with not lying down for prolonged periods of time, since I’d not been sleeping that well, so I tried to rest it off — but there wasn’t any back pain to speak of (besides the usual, but that’s not relevant) so again, confusion reigned supreme. And then I finally got sick of this valetudinarian prevarication and called my mother to ask. Luckily she was talking with a couple of doctors in her office, and their general consensus was that I had, wonder of wonders, an electrolyte imbalance. Which totally makes sense. I’ve been drinking more water than usual, hardly anything on my menu is salty, and things actually seemed better after I guzzled down a bottle of some energy drink. Also sometime today I started developing a motor tic around my right eye so potassium and magnesium sound like they are in demand by my body. I am going to have to drink orange juice or eat bananas or something to do something about that. Hopefully I’m not getting much wrong in terms of, you know, what to do when you do have electrolyte imbalance. Besides, how bad can orange juice and bananas possibly be for you? Tune in next time, when I let you know that I’m going to skip two weeks’ worth of posts because I’ve developed stomach ulcers.

[ETA] It just occurred to me that this entire blog is like an exercise in watching me fall apart. Honestly, since when were you so sensitive about imbalances, o mortal shell? I do not believe it. But then again, I did go two weeks in high school with a blinding idiopathic pain in my side that mysteriously went away — maybe now I’m just more of a whiner. At any rate, here I am, disintegrating. Thanks to the limitations of the bodily frame. And Takeshi Kaneshiro. (No, The Good, the Bad, the Weird did not capture my heart and soul, oddly enough. It would have if it had given the barest minimum of thought to who instead of how, but as it stands I did enjoy it. I’m just not going to lose any sleep over it.)

07. 08. EXCUSES

No pictures today. The headache that I mentioned on the dinner post of the 4th appears to be something along the lines of a mild case of heatstroke and dehydration. Which is kind of funny, since it’s not like I had so much work that I couldn’t possibly be bothered with drinking a blasted cup of water — it wasn’t that hot, and I did drink when I was thirsty. Evidently that’s not enough. Well, at least we suspect that it’s — I just realized that maybe “heatstroke” isn’t even the right word. That sounds much too dramatic. What it is, is that I still have this headache and I’m drinking gallons and gallons of water. I wasn’t much in the mood for taking pictures all day today, also I had a visit with the dentist so that was a hassle. This week doesn’t bode well for relaxation. But just for reference, breakfast was cereal: lunch was a ham and cheese sandwich: dinner was chicken, salmon and beef (I know, right, welcome to the festival of protein) along with assorted side dishes and rice. And a gallon of water. I am almost done with A Tale of Two Cities and maybe it’s because I do most of my reading on a bike but I must confess that I have no idea what’s going on. Also Sidney Carton is one of those characters that grovel and beg to be liked, so I can’t. Oh, Dickens, how you toy with my volatile heart.