It’s easy to get discouraged these days.
I’ve had a bad headache for almost two months now.* It’s exhausting. Eula Biss, in her essay, “The Pain Scale,” argues that one of the worst limitations of how we measure pain is that we don’t have a metric for how long it lasts. I’ve gone through the summer without a break, and I’ve been sort of beating myself up because I don’t have any more money than I started with and a lot of “to do” list things didn’t get done. And my oven broke about an hour ago. Flames shot out of it.
Thus, I have had to give myself little lectures on what got done this summer. They help.
WHAT GOT DONE THIS SUMMER:
I taught four classes (successfully).
We judged the Prized Writing submissions, then I edited the publication, and now it’s out.
I prepped my five Fall classes.
I served on two Campus Book Project committees.
I paid the “pay off the credit card in three years instead of a billion” amount.
I was given a new crock pot, and I tried out a bunch of new recipes.
I got two new kitties.
I fixed one expensive thing on my car and two on the boy’s.
I went to London to be in the wedding of two people I love dearly.
I spent quality time with my son, my friends, my man.
I’ve done a lot to try to make this headache go away–switching drugs (including going off the one that caused hallucinations), massage, chiropractic, physical therapy, lots of doctors’ appointments.
I went to Ashland with Vanessa and Kevin, where we had good food, good drinks, and saw five amazing plays in three days (The Heart of Robin Hood, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Cymbeline, The Tenth Muse, and King Lear).
My fractured tailbone healed.
I kept the house reasonably clean.
In addition to the plays I’ve already written about in past blogs, I saw Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen and Billy Crudup in No Man’s Land (not my favorite play, but it didn’t matter!).
I chose essays for an edited book proposal I’m about to send off.
There, now I feel better. Time for more painkillers.
*For those who don’t know, I have a low grade headache every day. This has been the case since I was 12. It’s always there. All of my treatments over the years are to minimize the days it’s bad–the days it’s debilitating–the days I identify which muscle groups I would like to inject with some miracle that would make them release–the days I fantasize about guillotines. It’s been almost two months now of those days.
