So, i'm here in sunny chicago. the phrase "camille, you are a miracle of affliction" kept running trough my head as i struggled to stay upright, pack a weekend of clothes and generally ready myself for travel. I learned that phrase from the book The Color Purple by Alice Walkr and I do believe it is one of the most descriptive colloquiallisms I've ever heard. Usually it is applied to others, as in, "Joe you sho is a miracle of affliction" meaning "Joe you have annoyed me beyond all human reason and now I'm thinking your fate lies with the woodchipper." Instead I apply it to myself.
I did get a new prescription last night, this one to calm down the small-print-fast-talking side effects off all my other medications. The small print fast talking thing applies to the miniscule print they put on products such as mcdonald's french fries that warn of the high caloric content, or on diet aids that warn it may cause the development of a tapeworm, or on the pharmaceutical commercials when a very pleasant-voiced peson mentions that if you use their product (as they have encouraged you to do for the pst 29 seconds) you are at risk for pulmonary embolism, anal leakage, kidney failure, blindness, losing all your limbs and the gums falling off your teeth. That's the small-print-fast-talking side effects stuff.
Before getting my new scrip I really was a miracle of afflication, even to my own self. I scared the heebie jeebies out of the boyfriend by falling alseep and missing about 20 phone calls from him and the offie so he rushed home to see if something was REALLLY wrong. I was so whacked and dehydrated - I must hae been a sight. I felt as though I had already been admitted to the doggone hospital. BTW, in the hospital although they are pumping you with IV fluids you get hella dehydrated, your mouth goes perma-dry - it's like sucking dry ice all the time. You even get a little foamy. It is the antithesis of sexy.
I spent most of yesterday doing mental pep talks "tomorrow is another day, you will be back on your feet in 3 days or so and you'll not miss a single trick, tricklicious. Then i would wobble, decide i was better on my back or just lying on my side and fall asleep there.
But now I got the new scrip and I'm in C-H-I with MayaShea (www.myspace.com/mayashea) and we're going to make some music. She's the instrumentalist and I'm the lyricist. We ain't Floetry, we're something else. As soon as I got semi-settled into the house she was asking if I wanted to hear new tracks and started the time-honored tradition of self-abuse about the music not being good enough and not having lyrics. I love passive-aggressiveness sometimes.
Anyway, as I was soaking in the tub I realized I didn't need to hear the tracks, i just need to know what she was feeling when she was creating them. That's where the lyrics will come from, the feeling that was existing when she played the chords, brought in the flutes and synthes and whatever else. It's great to have a partnership like that. When I look at those with whom I am closest I see the theme recurring, it's not so much that I pay attention to all the other crap (though I do tend to get distracted by their loser boyfriends, but that is another story altogether), it's that I plug into their emotional outlet and like the feeling and I decide to stay. Occasionally I run across people whose wires are seriously crossed, so the output starts out cool then runs at warp speed into something deeply traumatic. I've yet to have one of those crazy emotional outlets fail to come from someone who didn't experience severe emotional trauma at a young age i.e. sexual abuse, incest, physical and/or emotional abuse at the hands of some tortured adult.
Incidentally, Maya and I were re-hashing the "ex-factor." The small things that people who pass through your life teach you. These are small things, not the biggies like "when someone says they are bipolar you should believe them or "independent pharmaceutical representative means drug dealer" or "don't buy your significant other a $10,000 Ducati just because they whine a lot especially when you already know you want out of the relationship."
It's the smaller, better things. Things like learning how effective Orange-scented Formula 409 is in cleaning the fridge and other kitchen areas. Or that Simple Green is used by the Navy because it is completely biodegradable but can remove oil from the deck of a aircraft carrier. Another interesting tidbit gleaned from an ex-along-the-way, college football players are often enrolled in ballet classes to become more graceful. Someone else taught me that women are better fighter jet pilots because our bodies can withstand greater g-forces than our the vast majority of men. And tangentially related is the fact that liberal arts majors make better fighter jet pilots because they think creatively and access their right brain with greater ease and being a fighter jet pilot is nothing if not a creative endeavor. A one-night stand taught me what a gherkin was. He cooked something inedible with gherkins included and I was sick all the next day. I learned EXACTLY what a freaking gherkin was after that.
There was an ex who told me I could actually major in English in college and skip political science and another who stayed on the phone with me for 4 hours nonstop while I sobbed uncontrollably upon finding out that my stepdad had euthanized my dog and best friend Princess.
It's the little things.
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