4-26-2002: Smelly Kalikimaka
Sick again. I have the closing throat ickies. I woke up this morning wondering what if this will get worse. Tomorrow, will I start out of bed unable to breathe, pounding out a bleary 9-1-1 on the phone and hissing, "can't breathe! Cack!" before collapsing dramatically on the low-pile?
Nah.
What WILL happen is that this certain olfactory symptom is going to appear which constantly subjects me to the smell of stale, greasy, burned coffee. I'm not sure what is going on in my ear-nose-throatspace which causes me to think I am smelling old yucky grounds, but it happens regularly enough (usually during the "holiday season") that I recognize the smell immediately. Usually it hangs out in my nose/brain for a week or so, driving me nuts and remaining undetectable to everyone else. I have to remind myself that the smell is all in my brain. Or nose, or somewhere between the two. The first time it happened, I blamed coffee grounds rotting in the trash bin. Low-grade OCD insanity resulted as I tried to rid my house of every trace of this strange reek. Discovering that no one else could smell it was something of a relief, as I could then relegate this phenomenon to the ranks of hallucination. It makes me wonder how I'd deal with auditory or visual hallucinations if they plagued me with the same persistence as, say, John Nash.
Predictably, being sick makes me think about sickness, and how people get sick all the time and
everyone's used to it. Kind of strange, if you start off from a blank-page point of view, to periodically have your system afflicted with some kind of malady which, while not resulting in death, manifests itself as a collection of familiar symptoms. It's as if our body can only generate a few symptoms and it has to mix them in different combinations to express illness. What causes the symptoms, anyway? Those little viruses or germs, poking you in the brain and other meaty parts? Your own body, reacting violently in self-defense? Probably both, and in a more complicated way than I really want to subject myself to right now. I am, after all, sick.
My house kind of looks like my office. What does an office look like? Modern, sterile, clean, efficient, soulless, and draining? Not this one. Then again, it makes sense that it looks a lot like an office, because for nearly three years, it WAS my office. I can't believe I worked from home for so long.
Oh look, an old entry fragment I never posted:
How much of our adult life is spent coming to terms with one simple concept:
"It is okay to like the things that you like." Even now, I try to come up with
reasons it isn't okay. But it is! I like eating meat. Bacon, even. The reasons
this would be a morally and intellectually bad thing are that bacon is a dead animal (with
the implication that I should be eating dead plants instead because we understand less about how they perceive the
world and so it must be better to kill them), and bacon has shit loads of fat, sodium and cholesterol in it, which
can make you overweight and at risk of heart disease. These are reasonable concerns, but they don't make me like bacon any less.
Someday I might stop eating it out of sympathy for pigs or concern for my own health, but I doubt I'll stop liking it. Why do I even feel the
need to defend my penchant for fried pig whatever-part-that-is? I feel unsympathetic eyes on me. I think people will look down on my preferences, and by extension, on me.
I don't have a very well-reasoned reason for liking what I do. It's not really bacon that I'm talking about. It's anything.
Andrew, it's okay to like the things that you like. It is a good and true thing to have preferences.
Why am I so bent on being okay?
