I probably have had a sinus infection for a week or two. I'm mostly fine. No fever or chills. I'm fine just as long as I keep my head perfectly motionless. Bending down or swaying to the side or moving too fast leads to enormous swishing of fluids in deep cavities in my head. Purple pain. Compound curses. Shitdamnfuck.
The trick is to keep my head completely motionless, like I'm walking around with a book on my head. I should most likely receive medical attention, but I can't deal with a two hour wait at the walk-in clinic. So, I'm ignoring the whole business. Hey, I'm certainly improving my posture by the book-head thing.
Sometimes I worry that the evil sinus bacteria have somehow infiltrated my brain and I'm soon to collapse in the freezer department of Shop Rite spewing purple phlegm and moaning about the Yankees. That would suck.
Saturday, Steve took Ian took to his first big boy birthday party at some sports center, cleaned up the kid after he vomited the goodies from the party all over the backseat of the car, and bought a new vacuum from Sears. Our old vacuum had died a noble death in the battle to finish the kitchen floor. The old Eureka wasn't designed to eat that much sawdust.
While Steve did the birthday duties, I fiddled away at the kitchen floor. Actually, I spent most of the day keeping my head motionless and wood puttying. I went through 2 large containers of the stuff attempting to make the floor suitable for suburban consumption. Steve thought I was crazy as I sanded down areas that didn't meet inspection. The white floor had become my white whale.
Pointless epics acts that lead to self destruction and despair? Sounds like my dissertation.
Actually that was just a cheap segue to a Tom Wolfe quote about graduate school that I have been planning to post for a while.
Tom Wolfe, "The Feature Game," in The New Journalism, ed. Tom Wolfe, Harper & Row, 1973.
... I had just spent five years in graduate school, a statement that may mean nothing to people who never served such a stretch; it is the explanation, nonetheless. I'm not sure I can give the remotest idea of what graduate school is like. Nobody ever has. Millions of Americans now go to graduate schools, but just say the phrase -- "graduate school" -- and what picture leaps into the brain? No picture, not even a blur. Half the people I knew in graduate school were going to write a novel about it. I thought about it myself. No one ever wrote such a book, as far as I know. Everyone used to sniff the air. How morbid! How poisonous! Nothing else like it in the world! But the subject always defeated them. It defied literary exploitation. Such a novel would be a study of frustration, but a form of frustration so exquisite, so ineffable, nobody could describe it. Try to imagine the worse part of Antonioni movie you ever saw, or reading Mr. Sammler's Planet at one sitting, or just reading it, or being locked inside a Seaboard Railroad roomette, sixteen miles from Gainesville, Florida, heading north on the Miami-to-New York run, with no water and the radiator turning red in an amok pyschotic overboil, and George McGovern sitting besides you telling you his philosophy of government. That will give you the general atmosphere.