Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

So here is what is going on with me:

1. I have vertigo. You knew that part. It's gotten worse again lately, so all of you who had the glad cries about how much better it was: not any more. (This is expected.) Among the side effects of this is nausea.
2. I have gone back on the med to deal with the vertigo. I don't stay on for long long times for various reasons dictated by my neurologist. The med sucks. It works in some ways and sucks in others, and no, I don't want to talk about the details. There are some key side effects that suck. Also I don't get the desired effects until full dosage, and I am still ramping up and am at 3/4 dosage. But among the non-desired effects that will begin to seem relevant to this post is nausea.
3. Last week I got an ear infection. This increases guess what? vertigo. and guess what? vertigo-related nausea.
4. I also got strep throat. This makes it hurt to swallow. And yawn. I announced this afternoon that my new goal was to never yawn again. This was deemed infeasible by a committee of experts. It was a two-person committee unless you count the dog, who merely looked startled and alarmed unless she was thinking there was a rabbit outside. Still.
5. For strep and the ear infection I am on an antibiotic. Antibiotics are fun. Do you know what they cause? Nausea. Do you know what the new doctor said? She said, "If it makes you nauseated, you should take it with some food...oh...." YES OH.
6. One of my main modes of coping with nausea is to work out intensely for about an hour and a half a day. Today markgritter was on a phone meeting and timprov was having neck spasms of some spasmy spasmingness, so I put away 1/3 to 1/4 of a load of groceries. Then I went up the stairs. From this activity, my fever went up again. Not back to 103, and not for long. Just to "hi you have a fever remember that isn't it grand?" Also I am frankly kind of weak. So guess what I am currently not doing to cope with the nausea.

OH THE FUN TIMES WE HAD.

I just kind of...yeah. This is where I am right now. I have worked my way up to porridge and scrambled eggs. Not at once, too much swallowing. Honestly I don't really know what the timetable is here. No one can really tell me. I am coming up with awesome ideas like "David Simon produces Westmark!" and "they should sell basil like they sell kale, because you always want way more basil than they sell in the wee tiny herb packages, and people should eat basil like a fresh green anyway, so in conclusion more basil" and also things that actually qualify as story ideas. Like the one where a thinly veiled version of my Gran takes the piss out of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Harry Dresden. Yeah. But mostly I am trying to stay warm but not too warm and sometimes swallow things with calories in them and hope that I can someday again have pointy foods not just as a daydream but as a reality.

It's not that I don't want to talk. I just mostly want to talk on e-mail, is all. So if you want to talk, e-mail away.

It turns out that the line between "well enough to get propped up on the couch and watch Daria and A Bit of Fry and Laurie" and "not well enough to get propped up on the couch and watch Daria and A Bit of Fry and Laurie" is an important one.

I wouldn't think there would be much energy differential between lounging on the couch reading or watching a DVD or a hockey game and sitting at the computer writing. Turns out there is. Huh.

Also, as I said in e-mail to a friend this morning, several of you have said that you had pneumonia, and none of you has said, "Those were the days! Ah, the fun we had!" Funny thing about that, too.

Anyway. The Brother From Another Planet. It's hard to know what to say about this because part of what makes it fun and interesting the first time is figuring out what's going on for yourself. The main character is mute, and as a result the story relies very, very heavily on incluing, because there is no one onscreen for most of the movie who could sit down and tell you, "I am an alien from _____, and I am here because ______, and what I am going to do here is ______." I was a little frustrated early on, because I like Joe Morton's voice, and so casting him as a mute character is taking away something I like. But he also has a great deal of physical presence, both comedically and otherwise. I deeply respect a movie that successfully uses Joe Morton and a ratchet noisemaker in a scene that could otherwise have spent a great deal of money on special effects.

There are hilarious bits to this movie, but it's very much not a standard-issue comedy, and it's certainly not a comedy that takes its humor from crude renditions of the race relations of the mid-1980s, so I feel that the title may in some ways be misleading. Hmm. I think what I mean to say here is that it's not a genre comedy, it's a movie that's got funny things in it. And they go where things are funny rather than in a set pattern determined by the comedy movie genre. I really love the variety of responses and interpretations when the alien is asked where he's from and points his thumb upwards, and I love how his feet being noticeably different backfires on the bad aliens when they're trying to get human help in hunting him. And the fight scene, I love the fight scene.

The other reason I don't want to say too much here is that there's this line where one of the characters says to the alien, "You could be anybody," and I think that's true for the viewer, too, and if it works for you with a reading of the alien as x, I don't want to steer you into a reading where he is y instead and it works less well. Does that make sense at all?

Okay, back to the couch.

...a diagnosis of maybe the tiniest teeny little bit of pneumonia.

This is my rephrasing, as the original from-the-doctor's-mouth version omitted "maybe," "the tiniest," "teeny," and "little bit of."

Just imagine how keen I am on this. Oh, just imagine. Oh, all right, fine, I will tell you instead of making you imagine: not the least bit keen. Not the least bit keen at all. I said to markgritter yesterday when Dr. porphyrin brought this up as a possibility, "I don't think I should do that having-pneumonia thing. It doesn't sound like fun to me." And here we are, and it isn't. I was right.

Harumph harumph harumph harumph.

I am going on the assumption that 2010 will get less boring and obnoxious from here.

1. I don't have my singing voice back, but I have most of my speaking voice mostly back. So that's a good thing. I have this stupid cold on the run enough that I can, y'know, do stuff. I like stuff and the doing of it. I'm crazy that way.

2. In other news, the electricity is back to all parts of the house, and the mistakes of the last electrician have apparently been rectified, hurrah. This basement-finishing job: it looks to me as though the bits we will see take far less time than the bits we won't see. I hope I'm not wrong on that, or we will be another twelve million years in getting the drywall up.

3. It's been snowing here since before I woke up. A few hours ago, the plow and the mail delivery came through at the same time, attempting to pass each other multiple times within our small cul-de-sac. They looked like a mechanized Three Stooges routine. I do not mean this as a compliment. Our driveway guy has not been here yet. That is such a hopeful "yet," sitting right there. I don't really know how to articulate how I want him to do his job differently. Perhaps he'll come along and clear just around the time the snow is stopping, and I won't want him to do his job differently at all this time. One can hope.

4. When I went to let the dog out, she looked out in the snow, and then she looked up at me like, "Okay, monkey, there's a difference between funny once and funny all the time."

5. We are now owners of a startling share of the world's supply of chocolate, hot (or, more to the point, potentially hot) and otherwise. Eeeeexcellent. Now with only four hundred and six more steps, my plan for word domination will be complete.

Oh, there's supposed to be an l in that? Hmm. This may require substantial alterations to the said plans.

Cough still nasty, congestion still unpleasant, throat still a mess. But! I woke up this morning convinced that I must be better, because I had a short story idea in my NyQuil sleep.

And it kept making sense when I started writing it down, which is always a good sign, because NyQuil is good for those temporarily awesome story ideas that make you wake up a little further and say, "Er. Well. But what do the porpoises do with a golem, once they have one? And aren't the letters at grave risk of washing off his head?"

And then. Um. The thing is, short stories mostly do not come with chapters. And short stories do not come with subplots. And while short stories very well can come with E. Nesbit references, so can middle grade books. Of which this clearly is one.

Well, crud. At least the voice is fun to write. No, I'm sorry, let's amend that: oh crap, the voice is fun to write! Nothing for it but to rattle off the bits that come to me, save and close the file, and go trudging back to the couch to drink my juice and read a Marine Corps novel with nothing whatever to do with E. Nesbit. And try to figure out what I can actually eat, because the children in this book are eating popcorn and extremely hot curries, and that is not what I can eat at this juncture.

I am still sick, and my vertigo is still travel-whomped, so my big NYE plans involve a desperate hope for hot and sour soup, on the theory that it is good for congestion and will be strongly flavored enough to help cut through the vertigo-plus-cold appetite woes. markgritter is also sick. Whee.

I am not big on making year-in-review posts, still less big on making decade-in-review posts. So instead I will mention two Christmas present things. One is that this was apparently the year for things to wear upon my wrist. From my grandmother I got a much-needed watch (so now we just have to take it to Macy's to get it sized). markgritter got me these awesome bits of Meteorite NWA869. And Santa Mom put in my stocking a little pewter bracelet that reads, "Fall seven times. Stand up eight." I needed it, and lo, it was there. It's been a lot more than seven times, but then it's been a lot more than eight also.

The other thing is that timprov got markgritter the Battlestar Galactica board game for Christmas. timprov played it with numinicious and ckd, and he liked it, and he suspected that I might, and markgritter likes games a fair piece better than I do, so giving him a game he had a reasonable chance of getting to play seemed like a good thing. And I do like it. I like the balance of cooperation and competition. The three of us played it last night, and before that we played it on Christmas with greykev. On Christmas, Grandma opined that it must be a very complicated game, with all the cards and the pieces, and it is somewhat complicated, but it's not difficult to pick up enough to play. I expect we'll discover nuances as we play it. Most games either don't engage me at all or take over my brain to an unhealthy extent--I can't play Tetris, for example, without having my brain obsessing about Tetris pieces, and I have to limit my Blokus playing or I will have dreams of fitting funny little colored squares together. I think the BSG board game hits the sweet spot between the two. I like not knowing who's on your side for the whole game. I like having a decent possibility of changing your goals mid-game, or at least having to change how you're going to achieve them. At some point I may get experimental enough to agree to play somebody horrible like Apollo, but that's a ways off, I think. Even without the expansion pack you can be any of the good characters, which is to say that you can be country or Western Sharon, Helo, or the Chief. So that makes me happy.

This predates Christmas, but I've also really been digging Antje Duvekot's album The Near Demise of the High Wire Dancer, and no, not just because it starts with a song about vertigo. There's one she wrote after reading a bio of Woody Guthrie, and you can totally tell if you read that particular bio too. And as long as I'm talking about music, have my best New Year's song, Josh Ritter's "Empty Hearts". Josh sorta looks like a scruffy Muppet in this particular bit of video, but I understand there are those among you who like that sort of thing. I'm pretty croaky, but I may still see if timprov is up for playing it, because I love it so much, and it's exactly the right song for New Year's. Even for a wobbly croaky New Year's. Stay safe tonight if you're wilder than we are, or heck, even if you're not.

I have found a vein of popcorn in my grandpa's library, and I'm mining it to get me through this stupid obnoxious virus, like ya do, like I'm absolutely sure he did. This particular popcorn is Stuart Woods novels, thrillers. The main character is Stone Barrington, which is quite, um, quite enough. But in this particular volume, he's having adventures with Thomas Hardy and Harry Pitts.

Perhaps we should all let an 11-year-old boy and a Victorian literary enthusiast split the naming rights to our characters. Think of the fun.

ETA: They have just met a character called James Tiptree. Oh dear.

This part of not being sick: it feels suspiciously like being sick.

In the two and a half years I've been posting about regular vertigo episodes*, I have had a pattern of e-mails and lj posts directed my way. One of you will get a cold and have your balance knocked off-kilter, and you will note that you thought of me, and that it really sucked.

It turns out that I, too, can get a cold and have my balance knocked off-kilter. From its current suboptimal state.

Wheeeeeeeefun.

Also it turns out that postnasal drip combines poorly with vertigo-induced nausea.

Now that I think of it, I can't come up with anything postnasal drip combines well with. But worse than that low standard, really.

Okay. Non-whiny posts after I face the lunch dilemma. I promise.

*Yes. Two and a half. June 2006, to be exact. I tend to think of it as "about a year," because Thanksgiving 2007 is when things got really debilitating consistently. But 1) I do have to increment that time: it's been over a year since Thanksgiving 2007 and 2) it's really important for me not to behave as though the only states are "barely functional" and "fine."