Friday, March 15, 2013

They're American planes, made in America


In lieu of an actual post (and I am so very jet-setting and whirlwindy these days that I haven't had time to write anything real down), I thought I would take a moment to transcribe what I typed into my phone in an attempt to stay awake at various points during my recent return to the US from a weekend in London. Also, all of the preceding was just one sentence. Wow. In any event, this is what I'm like over the course of a few hours when running on little-to-no sleep:

11 March 2013, 4:10 a.m. GMT (or thereabouts)

Waiting on the train to Gatwick. No wifi. Haven't slept yet and probably will not until we depart for Manchester (2.5 hours UGH).

In the station (which is freezing): squatters sleeping under the escalators, man who has sneezed but not wiped his nose pacing from one end of the station to the other, kid doing first push-ups and then the Electric Slide to stay awake. Three kinds of people in Victoria at 4 am: homeless, crazy, and on the way to Gatwick.

Missing Chicago not because of the weather or because I don't love London but because I miss my own bed and the cat, electric heating pads and hot showers and peanut butter, which nobody thinks about till they have been in a foreign country and craved it but the shops sell only Nutella or Marmite (worst of all possible fates) because THERE IS NO PEANUT BUTTER IN EUROPE. Thinking about becoming a peanut butter evangelist. Eventually, though, the Toast Spread Crusades would inevitably follow, which would be a damned shame.

No sleep in 22 hours now. Nausea setting in, headache settled behind the eyes, imagining that the train is rocking back and forth. Sore from my long walk and imagining that my body is poisoning itself with lactic acid seeping from muscles into veins. Feverish but no fever. Entire body is vibrating. So tired.

Took tomorrow (today) off from work. Plan on taxi-ing home, feeding Pen, taking muscle relaxant, sleeping till tomorrow morning. Might sleep on plane, will probably sleep on plane, but never any guarantees.

Train moving. Stay awake. STAY AWAKE.

- - -

About two hours later:

Did not stay awake. Got a blissful thirty minutes of sleep on the train.

Shin splints made the jaunt between the two terminals an adventure. Can't wait to sprint from my gate in Manchester to the gate for the flight to Chicago.

Breakfast at a French(-style) cafe: omelette, fried potatoes, coffee. The waiter offered orange juice and I was disoriented to say yes so I had three beverages, including water, which he found very amusing. Feeling more awake now, but only just. The nausea is, at least, faded, and that was the part I was having difficulty with.

Boarding now.


I feel compelled to add that, despite the above bitching and moaning, it was a relatively pain-free journey from London back Stateside. There were no unnecessarily long waits at customs or security, and there was only a minor scare in Manchester where my seat had been changed due to a flight delay and I was interrogated by a man about my business in London as two military men with the biggest assault rifles I have ever seen looked on. Probably not all that frightening if you aren't completely disoriented from lack of sleep.

Next adventure: Florida. Will post updates from the road, if at all possible. 

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Putting it together; or, BS reassembles her jigsaw life

After the accident.

It took about five days for the initial shock to pass. Christmas night I watched the Doctor Who Christmas special (of course) and then went to do something else around the house, and happened to pass the television just as BBC America aired the very end of "The Angels Take Manhattan" which is, as anyone who watches Doctor Who knows, soul-crushing. This was the thing that broke through the post-accident brain-fog, and the thing that broke me down. After five days, I finally cried--a lot. It was, I think, a reaction to the realization of just how bad the accident was, and how much worse it could have been. The car that hit my Camry was a Hyundai Sonata, going between 35 and 40 miles an hour; a larger vehicle, or one traveling faster, could have seriously injured or even killed me. My airbags didn't deploy. Somehow, no glass was broken, I didn't hit my head, the most serious injury was the bruising from where I slammed into the driver's-side door.

I've been back in the city now for a little over a week, and it's beginning to feel as if I'm coming out of the stasis I was in during my visit to my parents' house. The holiday season, usually stressful, had a little extra kick this year, because in addition to the fallout of the accident, we also made the decision to say goodbye to Macavity, who had been a member of our family for seventeen years and nine months, after  taking a sharp turn for the worse between Christmas and the New Year. All in all, I have decided to consider this holiday season to be the lowest possible point, from which things can only improve. And, I have to admit, it's impressive that this holiday season finally edged out the year I was seven or eight and Mom had to take me to the hospital on Christmas Eve because of a high fever, after which I projectile-vomited the fluorescent pink medicine the doctor had prescribed all over my grandmother's house. That year, I opened gifts with the family while lying on the floor. That was the year my grandmother bought me a copy of Monica Furlong's book Wise Child and a collection of female-centric fairy stories called Tatterhood, which is, it is possible, are the books which first gave me an awareness of feminism.

Now that I think of it, I don't have that many memories of childhood, but the ones I do have are vivid.

So. I'm piecing my life back together after re-entering the world of the living. My re-entry was, it must be noted, not half-assed in any way: I arrived in town on Tuesday morning, and on Tuesday night a friend and I went to Hansel and Gretel at the Lyric, after which I attended an opera-affiliated networking event at a swanky bar. The next night, I went out with a friend in Wicker Park. And then I didn't leave the house for two days, because being social is work, man.

Speaking of work, I have been doing a lot of it. In fact, work takes up approximately 50% of my life (the remaining 50% is split between sleeping, drinking coffee, and reading books I hated or avoided reading in high school). I will not talk about work here, because work takes up too much of my life already without infiltrating my blog.

I taught at a high school yesterday, which was a nice change of pace from the everyday grind of making phone calls to musicians to talk about other musicians. This time it was sophomores, and the subject was chemistry (a class that, for the record, I somehow avoided in high school). Thankfully, the teacher left a worksheet for the class to do, and the subject matter basic enough that answering questions wasn't too difficult. During my planning period, I read Of Mice and Men because I had finished The Jungle while the students were working on homework during academic lab. The Jungle is an excellent book, and Of Mice and Men kind of made me hate everything. I guess one could argue that both books involve terrible people doing terrible things to other terrible people, but at least the over-the-top call to action at the end of Sinclair's book reminded me of the over-the-top choral endings of Shostakovich's 2nd and 3rd Symphonies, and those always made me smile.

This entry is terribly scattered. I suppose that's the result of my brain being shocked into almost-frantic action after doing so little during the holiday. Well, we'll just have to go with that, I suppose. I have more to say than I had expected.

A student in one of my classes yesterday had a birthday. He turned sixteen, and I realized that there are students in high school, which is damned near adulthood, who were born either the year Monicagate happened or the one before it. This is the first time I have been aware of a group of people who, for the most part, have their own thoughts and ideas and are well on their way to being independent human beings, who are too young to remember a major cultural event I remember reacting to (and, for the record, my reaction at the time was, "Really? You're calling his leadership into abilities into question because of that? Really?!" I was a precocious twelve-year old). It occurred to me, as it sometimes does: I am nearer to thirty than twenty, and I don't feel any older than 22. Is this a thing that happens to everyone, the feeling that there is a huge discrepancy between the age one is and the age one perceives oneself to be? Either way, it's a strange moment of self-awareness for someone who still occasionally gets carded while buying tickets for R-rated movies (which did happen in November, when I bought a ticket for Lincoln).

Speaking of R-rated movies, I am currently half-watching a pre-rehab Robert Downey, Jr. movie called In Dreams and I have no idea what's going on. I'm less lost than I was during The Expendables, but still . . . 

I think I've said about all I want to say for now, though. In the future, there will be book talk! There is a truly terrible book I've been meaning to write about but I needed to take a couple of months before going back to it, because it may be the worst thing I have ever read. Hilariously so. More on that later.