10 January 2002 ~ Getting the fucker removed, 267 pages, and Helena the shameless hussy...

So I was bitching a few days ago (a few weeks ago? months?) that I've ceased to believe in the paradise that is homeostasis.

Yes, we're back on that subject. Sorry.

What with the bus trip out here (during which I slept maybe a grand total of eight hours in three and a half days), getting used to new water, getting used to new WEATHER, dealing with all sorts of new smells (including a pot-smoke smell that keeps insistently finding its way back to MY room: phantom weed or something...) and sounds and people, and, probably worst of all, with being essentially forced to drastically cut back on my nicotine intake, I'm REAL fucked-up.

I keep telling myself: in a few days, or a few weeks, or maybe a month, I'll feel REALLY good; it's just a matter of adjusting. But right now, my body really hurts, mostly in the spleenish area, and I'm pretty damned drowsy. I'm thinking of going to the school nurse and asking her to refer me to a spleenectomist. (...psst -- I made that word up...)

Sometimes I'm ravenously hungry, sometimes the thought of food makes me want to croak. When I'm NOT hungry, yet I haven't eaten all day, should I eat, or should I wait? And what if I choose the wrong one and feel a hell of a lot worse?

They say mononucleosis lasts between one month and three months, and the symptoms can bother you for up to a year. I'm counting down the damned days: five more months, and one more week, and if I EVER feel ill after that, EVER AGAIN, I'm going to sue WebMD for millions and millions of dollars -- for getting my hopes up.

They say one shouldn't be working or doing much activity if one's spleen is severely swollen, which mine is. Oh fucken well. If my spleen bursts, so be it. I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired, as they say. I'd rather undergo surgery and have the fucker removed than live my life in bed... Seriously, I'm going to Campus Health tomorrow to beg for something -- anything -- to make me not hurt so much...

I've been faithfully reading all day. This book is not exactly my absolute favorite, but I don't actually despise it. It's difficult to keep paying attention, but I've been really forcing myself. Little rewards help: twenty more pages and you get to get out of bed. Ten more pages and you get to go to the bathroom. Twenty more after that, and you can go down and have a cigarette. Seventy pages total, and you can eat.

I'm on page 267 now -- exactly halfway through. Maybe I can read the other 267 pages tomorrow. If nobody hears from me, I'll be tearing my way through this freaking book. After all, I maybe have a kind of date this weekend! Not a chance in the world I'm going to bail out over a hundred pages or so... Or for that matter, an achy spleen.

Indeed, a date, sort of!

In my experience, people don't date anymore. Aaron and I have discussed this several times, at some length; here are some of our theories...

Back in our parents' day, males and females did not "hang out." I mean, it doesn't SEEM much like they did, based on their yearbooks. Now, with lines blurred between the genders, "hanging out" with a person of the opposite gender is only a really big deal if you're in middle school. In middle school, everything is a big deal, so that doesn't count. Aaron and I aren't sure if this is a devaluation of the respective gender classifications, or if it's about damned time...

If Helena Thomas had been born in 1945, and had gone out with a boy in 1963 to buy a soda at the corner store, it would have been a date. Sounds pretty absurd, doesn't it? How many times, after all, has Helena gone to the store to buy a soda? How many of those times was she accompanied by a male? Why Helena, you shameless hussy. Oh yeah, it's definitely about damned time human beings were allowed -- and encouraged -- to spend time with each other without it being called a "DATE."

A "date" is so limiting. If you're "dating" somebody, you can't be dating anybody else, or you're a shameless hussy. And if, by "dating," we mean something like, "going to Denny's," or "watching television together," or "taking a walk at night," or "buying sodas together," Helena Thomas is the most shameless hussy of them all. Imagine having to forge some formal agreement before you could go out for wings with somebody! Imagine having to "break up" with your Denny's partner in order to walk to the store with somebody else? THAT, mes amis, is crap. My grandparents did that shit, and my parents, to a lesser degree, did that shit, and *I* am not going to do that shit.

But ANYWAY... Where the fuck was I going with this?

Oh yeah. So, no, I do not have a date this weekend. I don't like "dates." Because now -- now that "date" doesn't necessarily mean something as lame as going to get coffee -- "dating" either means "long-term monogamous relationship," or it means "booty-call." (As in, "So-and-so just called: I've got a date...") What I have this weekend (assuming, naturally, that everything works out well...) is the old-fashioned version of a date, I think. Helena meeting up with somebody she thinks is really, really cool, for an old-fashioned session of "HANGING OUT." Neat.

Now WHY was I telling you this again?

Oh yes! Because I have to get all my reading done before Saturday!

...I'm going back to work now.... Ugh...

~Helena*