My Body Is Always Getting In the Way

This morning I woke up at about 5:30 with a throbbing headache. This would not be atypical but I just had my every couple month headache only a few weeks ago so I had to figure out why I was oh so very lucky to be blessed with one on a Saturday. After sucking down a huge glass of water, two aspirin and a coffee the size of my bathroom sink, I am chalking it up to recalcitrance.

My body knew that I finally had a weekend day off, a day where the plans were to spend the day doing “nothing”. Well, in a manner of speaking.

To some it might sound like my head is, in essence, saying ‘hey dummy, now you get to lie down all day and relax like you planned.’ and that is all well and good but I don’t want to be forced into it. It is a choice I want to make on my own. Plus who can relax when they feel like crap? I was really looking forward to just lazing about on the couch while not feeling…well, not feeling period, just being.

Of course even as I type that I know it’s a big bunch of crap. I never just stop moving and chill out all day. I know myself way better than that (as evidenced by the fact that I am sitting here typing away a blog post even though my face feels like it could fall off my head at any second. But, Yeah. Relax. Sure I will.)

This goes right to the part of my personality where I really dislike being idle in body or mind. I think I truly have some deep seeded fear that if I stop moving, I might just perish from indolence (you like the added drama there?). Forget drowning or burning up in a fire, dying from boredom is definitely at the top of my worst ways to go list.

“Tell me, Doc, how did she meet her maker?”
“Oh the moron bored herself to death. I mean all she had to do was get up and do something. What an idiot.”

So then, because I am me, the self diagnosed bipolar freak show, I take everything right to the edge of the extreme and instead of progressing along at a nice even, manageable pace, I live my life as if I were a Nascar driver -- rapidly weaving with the bare minimum of pit stops; only when I blow a gasket, bounce off a concrete wall and roll ten or fifteen times. We can all figure out what the headache equates to in this convenient symbolism, right?

Irony always makes me laugh, even when it is presented as a sucky and wrong situation like today. Right now birds are chirping and the sun is pouring into my living room window. Here in Boston we have not seen the sun come out before six o’clock in the evening in what feels like months; therein lies the paradox -- the sun comes out just as it is about to set. So the entire day is dark and grey until it is too late to get out and do anything. Now, on the one day when it would be nice to have it dark and grey to not further upset my head, it is bloody perfect outside.

At least the rest of the city’s residents will be able to enjoy the first sunny weekend day in eons but bright light plus headache equals not a happy camper over in this seat.

Apparently Mother Nature likes to snicker and today I picture her pointing and laughing at me. It was bad enough that she created that total mockery with the rising-setting sun for the past few weeks, but today she has heaped on a big spoonful of Murphy’s Sunny Day Law just for good measure. The Bitch.

Yeah well I’ll show her who is really the head’s honcho around here. I have now been up for about three hours and my effort to rebel against the pain by using water, caffeine and drugs seems to be doing the trick. I might not have started this battle but I am bound and determined to win the war.

You will know that has happened as soon as the sun goes behind a cloud for the rest of the day.