The title of this post was going to be I’m Not Dead Yet, but then I saw this in the Evening Standard, and Everything Changed.
How much do I love that the Evening Standard likes to use Monty Python quotes to update readers on GM’s health? One of the things that warms my heart about British newspapers, in addition to gleeful Monty Python references, is their dedication to the pun. It’s like Elizabethan humour never went out of style. Finally I have found my people. Also the withering sarcasm, which gloriously, is not limited to the newspaper. For example, the other day, someone tried to get on the bus without paying and the driver said, without skipping a beat, “This isn’t Hogwarts, Darling: here you have to pay.” If a bus driver in Vancouver sassed back so wittily, I would shake his hand.
Anyway, yep, this is your first official George Michael Sighting. Now I know, you’re thinking, what?! This doesn’t count! But please recall that I never said anything about seeing him IN PERSON. In fact, I believe I promised to be so oblivious that I would be unable to spot celebrities even if I fell over them, so be pleased with what you’re getting.
The other thing that makes me happy about this update (apart from absolving me from obliviousness for once, since OBVIOUSLY I cannot be expected to spot someone who is actually in bed in the hospital) is that it seems GM and I share a common bond – the English Death Cold. I can’t really blame this on the English, it appears by all accounts to be rampant everywhere, but I like to think England has embellished it with its own clever little twist and that THAT’S why I’m still shuffling around sneezing and hacking. I guess I should regard the fact that I too am not in hospital recovering from pneumonia as a major accomplishment. Because let me tell you, the one thing my lungs love to do better than anything, is develop a serious infection. It’s their favourite hobby. But perhaps the gods felt that breaking my hand was enough drama for one year and let me off the hook.
So yes, I have been sick and thus utterly absent from the interwebs the past couple of weeks. Remember the part where I said I was blogging cuz I’m lazy and can’t maintain all my correspondence. Well, nothing makes me lazier then feeling like hell, and now I’m trying to catch up on everything in an orgy of guilt and Protestant Work Ethic. You probably thought I died. PSYCHE. (heh, bet you thought THAT joke was deader than a doornail, huh? Not for me).
But though absent, I had not forgotten you, my dears. In fact, my heart was filled with longing to regale you with my adventures, and I even tried a couple of times to write, but it always went horribly wrong and devolved into something a little like this:
My head hurts, my throat hurts, my eyes hurt, my hair hurts. I hate everything and I am probably dying of a combination of Swine flu, Spanish Influenza and the SWETYNGE SICKENESSE. Don’t try to rescue me, it’s already too late, here is my last will and testament.
Or feverish ramblings in nonsense rhyme form. Seriously. When I was a child, even the mildest fever would send me off into a Hallucinogenic trance the like of which only an acid trip can replicate. Which pretty much cured me at age 4 from the desire to EVER deliberately get high. Cuz they were are always of the fearful paranoid kind, where everyone I knew became unrecognizable monsters and random things, like wrinkled blankets would send me into a panic – seriously, I remember my Dad having to take me to the living room and remove all the throws from the room because I kept freaking out that they were “too Crinkled.” Thank God, that particular awesome symptom wore off with adolescence, but its replacement is nightmarish nursery rhyme jumbles that go round and round in my head like a merry go round from hell. It always begins innocently enough with me trying to remember a snatch of poetry, or a phrase I’ve heard somewhere, but next thing I know I fixate on something and my brain starts spitting out an endless garble of background chatter that won’t cease.
So in the midst of the death cold one night, on the way home, where, incidentally, I kept imagining seeing toads everywhere, which was the first warning sign, the old nursery rant started up, and I thought, hey, let’s be all creative and free association and update everyone one my current state – maybe it’ll be amusing. The result… wasn’t pretty. Dickinson set me off this time – I kept trying to remember a complete poem…
And found my self muttering away, faster and faster:
“Tell all the truth, but tell it slant, success in circuit lies too brightforourinfirmdelightthe truth’s superb surprise… Likelightningtothechildren… explained? Claimed? Blamed? I hate it when I can’t remember the whole poem… damn… I wonder if I remembered to turn off the gas on the stove? I’m pretty sure I did but still gas is… gas! Gas! Quick boys, an ecstasy of fumbling, yellow stars are falling down, falling down, my fair lady, oh, camptown ladies sing this song, doodah, doodah… I wonder if that was meant to be Camden ladies. There’s a racing track out that way I think, bet my money on a bobtailed nag, all the live long day…. Gah, here we go, will I even sleep tonight with the moon out … whenever the moon and the stars are set, whenever the wind is high, Yankee doodle went to town, riding on baloney, if you hit him in the face then you can call him phoney. ARGH, shut UP, brain. I can’t even take more medicine yet…”
Believe me I could go on (the next morning I found two pages of this. I know. I’m frightened too). But since this is a boring to me now as it was mesmerizing at the time (where I was all like WOW, look at me, I’m T.S. Eliot), I’m gonna leave it at that.
Anyway, between the crazy and the grumpy, it didn’t really seem like the best time to write.
[Ooh, in an interesting side note, (wait for it, this is SUPER exciting), Swine flu and Spanish influenza, which are like, pathogen ancestors or something, tended to attack the able bodied healthy most violently, and to most fatal effect, and, at least in the case of the Spanish Influenza, this was actually because people’s strong immune systems went into overdrive. Their immune responses were TOO strong, and that’s what killed them. Sorta. According to what wikipedia tells me. Now, this is interesting because the Sweating Sickeness, which swept in out of nowhere in the 1500s, decimated the population for a couple years, and then utterly vanished, was so called because its victims would break into a sudden fever induced sweat, become disoriented and die WITHIN HOURS. How did such a crazy virulent disease then just VANISH in a couple of years? Perhaps because we are witnessing the progenitor of the Spanish and Swine flus, and once it was no longer new on the block, people’s immune systems either fought it off all together or didn’t flip out quite so much and it just seemed like a regular nasty flu. Amazing, right? I should’ve been an epidemiologist. Also, it explains why I, who picks up EVERYTHING, somehow skipped swine flu, or didn’t notice that I had it (I did get a mild flu around that time). Because my immune system SUCKS, so it wouldn’t have the cojones (why does it seem less vulgar to me if I say it in Spanish?) to flip out and get me into serious trouble even if I did have it.]
Anyway, that brings me to the next thing I want to tell you, and it has nothing to do with England, but it’s my blog, SO I CAN DO WHATEVER I WANT. And it shall be called:
I Hate Everything. It Must Be Thursday.
It’s not Thursday right now, FYI. This is just a Dramatic Renactment involving my feelings about homesickness and travel.
So, some of you may have been under the impression, based on my previous entries, that I have spent my entire time in England in a euphoric rhapsody over EVERYTHING. Which doesn’t really fit with what you know about my general personality in everyday life. Let me clear that up. For every two days of blissed out joy, I have a couple of days or times a day where I become deeply overwhelmed or staggeringly grumpy, or both, over everything that is not LIKE HOME.
I remember noticing this when I was on exchange in France, and it really did seem that the homesickness would attack on schedule, certain days of the week. My general approach to travel and new places is to treat everything like a fascinating anthropologic adventure, where even hideous annoyances are all part of the Charm and the Learning Experience (witness me, first week, all, ooh, tube delays? HOW EXCITING!!!! I am PERSONALLY experiencing commuter congestion IN LONDON. EEE!!). Naturally, even crazy travel-obsessed me can’t maintain this state permanently.
I tend to get incredibly tragic about everything particularly when I’m tired or hungry (if you ever hear me going on about how everything I’ve done in life is futile, just hand me a sandwich and I will perk right up in about 20 minutes), but homesickness is an entirely different beast. The feeling is particularly strong when you’re operating in a different language. The game starts to go sour on you, and you just want to go around to all the extremely French or Swedish or whatever people, and be like, look, time out, it’s been really fun and all, but I know you all secretly speak English and have peanut butter, so can you just cut it out for today, cuz I’m not in the mood. We can play again tomorrow. And of course you can’t, cuz they’re not playing and you’re the weird one who doesn’t fit, which doesn’t improve your mood in the slightest.
It hasn’t hit me here all that hard. What with it being the birth place of my first language, and the host of all my obsessive academic fascinations, and its dedication to tea, England is probably one of the few countries I can truly imagine relocating to happily if I ever had to leave Canada behind. But still, there are times when it’s just damn annoying.
So there are days when I stagger around in a towering GRUMP, doing my best to restrain myself and be forbearing with everyone for being so terribly English, and not having normal teriyaki sauce in their stores, or parking in ways that continue to baffle to me (and conform not at all to the side of the road the car is supposed to be on or the direction it’s supposed to be facing, by the way). And NO ONE appreciates my incredible forbearance and just goes on being English and not having teriyaki sauce. Which is a great trial. During these times, it helps to go and quietly gaze at THIS and think how superior my homeland is to EVERYWHERE ELSE:
Or to think of the Thames. But then I realize, I’m just having a “Thursday” and sure enough, next day, everything fine and acceptable again.
And there are also days when I just totally overdo it, so I go from extreme joy to total freak out. I’ll be tripping around Camden Market after a long day in the library, IN LOVE with everything. Amazing tights! Lacy fanciful clothes that I don’t really need but would love to wear! Antiques! Vintage furs!!! Hooray!!! Bliss!! It’s all so wonderfully awesomely amazing…wait…where’s the exit again? Haven’t I walked by that door like six times now? Man I’m hungry. And tired. Oh God, WHERE is the exit?!? Wait, that’s not the exit I wanted. Which direction am I facing? GAH. That’s the same damn door again!! That vendor clearly thinks I’m insane. I am seriously never going to get home.
And suddenly I’m all like, Help! I'm trapped in Camden Market!! If I don’t find the way out and a tube station Right Now, my head is going to explode and I’m going to have a tantrum. Is it okay to call the police and ask for rescue? If I give them my name and address will they have someone pick me up and take me home? I need to Get. Out. of Here.
So it goes. As you can see, I have not lost in travel my capacity to be an overreacting spaz, though I have to admit, most of the time, I am ANNOYINGLY happy. Like if I had to put up with me, getting all excited over Roasted Lamb crisps, I’d probably smack me (and yes, those exist).
But the first two weeks of November did severely test my capacity for sanguine patience, because in addition to being sick and sometimes homesick, I also was house sitting, which not only threw me out of all my usual routines, but kicked off a spate of lost-getting that amazed even ME. And that is hard to do. Not that the house sit and East London wasn’t fabulous, and of that more anon, but it all sorta came together to make November a rather trying month. As a result, I’m only just getting back to you now, adoring public, but I promise to be better in the future.
To that end, I have decided that this was the introspective blog entry. Since so much has happened since last we talked, I’m going to break this into two parts so my post doesn’t crash the entire internet and rival the Fairy Queen for length. SO you’ll just have to wait till tomorrow (hopefully) to hear what I’ve been up to when not being grumpy and sick (or actually, while being grumpy and sick).
Love, Typhoid Mary
No comments:
Post a Comment