(no subject)
It's about drugs, history, yearning for the forgotten past, that Welsh word hiraeth for all things left behind. Sick.
Getting a fever is weirdly nostalgic. I vividly remember being sick as a kid, exhausted with heat and chills and without words to describe this uncomfortable new reality. Now I have more words, like 'gastroenteritis' and 'food-bourne bacteria' and 'free day off work'. I've seen enlarged images of salmonella cells, pinkish, rod-shaped, studded with waving flagella. This knowledge is no comfort on the bathroom floor, cold tile pressed against my panting, sweating, putrid corpse.
Stop being so dramatic.
I am not dying, just ill. Sick enough to call in to work and fret around the house whining to myself. Each trip from the couch feels like an epic. Refill water, stagger back to the nest of blankets and books on the couch. Get up, vomit, the hero returns to watch Kimmy Schmidt and cry at the cat.
For someone so quick to find drugs on a Friday night, I'm awfully slow to realize that I can also medicate my fever. After hours of wallowing and loafing I check the medicine cabinet.
More grown up words. Doses. Pills. Razors. Hair clips. Refresh. Renew. Regenerate. Creams. Powders. Blush brushes. Files. Why do I have so much beauty salon crap instead of actual medicine in this cabinet? The bathroom lurches in front of me. Acetominaphin. Finally. I wonder if I can keep it down long enough with all this vomiting and briefly consider the prescribed but unused suppositories stuffed on the bottoms shelf. The cannabis back in the bedroom is probably going to be the most effective at helping me keep anything down, I realize.
First Nations People in North America used parts of trees and other plants to treat colds, wounds, inflammations, burns, sore eyes, rheumatism, headaches and insect bites. They had medicine and pharmacology before the arrival of Europeans. Did you learn that in school? I didn't. Hundreds of substances used by Indigenous Peoples are now listed in the United States Pharmacopeia and the National Formulary. Some of these are in my medicine cabinet. We hear accounts of Lewis and Clark being given willow bark tea, which contains salicylate, but no story of those who taught them this anelgesic. If you google 'history of aspirin and acetylsalicylic acid' you get the story of the rich white guy in 1899 who funded its more efficient extracture and monetization.
Weed is my mainstay, followed closely by coffee and alcohol, in my usual first defenses against whatever life throws at me. I forget my own history so easily when others have their robbed from them. I know almost no Ukrainian history. I can not even begin to pronounce whatever strange Slavic ghosts my ancestors warded off in their culture and time. I know no literature, no mythology, very little language of their people. My reality is so different from theirs - college graduate saddled with debt and good intentions, working at a women's organization, multiple side gigs like proctoring and tutoring and copyediting. Lives with her boyfriend and their cat. Spends money on books and shows, laughs at internet memes, gets into long discussions about politics and music, bakes but in a hipster way. There is no room in this narrative for sober faced ancestors, ancient farmers and peasants whose challenges I can not even begin to understand. I live in this world, now, with my own troubles and hustles and insecurities.
Knowing why something is happening doesn't make you feel any better about it or make it easier to deal with. Being sick makes me think of my childhood, memories of being comforted and treated into health, a small world tended to by caring and certain adults. Now I am an adult and I am so uncertain about everything. And here is that feverish hiraeth, that longing for the home we barely remember and can't go back to.
Getting a fever is weirdly nostalgic. I vividly remember being sick as a kid, exhausted with heat and chills and without words to describe this uncomfortable new reality. Now I have more words, like 'gastroenteritis' and 'food-bourne bacteria' and 'free day off work'. I've seen enlarged images of salmonella cells, pinkish, rod-shaped, studded with waving flagella. This knowledge is no comfort on the bathroom floor, cold tile pressed against my panting, sweating, putrid corpse.
Stop being so dramatic.
I am not dying, just ill. Sick enough to call in to work and fret around the house whining to myself. Each trip from the couch feels like an epic. Refill water, stagger back to the nest of blankets and books on the couch. Get up, vomit, the hero returns to watch Kimmy Schmidt and cry at the cat.
For someone so quick to find drugs on a Friday night, I'm awfully slow to realize that I can also medicate my fever. After hours of wallowing and loafing I check the medicine cabinet.
More grown up words. Doses. Pills. Razors. Hair clips. Refresh. Renew. Regenerate. Creams. Powders. Blush brushes. Files. Why do I have so much beauty salon crap instead of actual medicine in this cabinet? The bathroom lurches in front of me. Acetominaphin. Finally. I wonder if I can keep it down long enough with all this vomiting and briefly consider the prescribed but unused suppositories stuffed on the bottoms shelf. The cannabis back in the bedroom is probably going to be the most effective at helping me keep anything down, I realize.
First Nations People in North America used parts of trees and other plants to treat colds, wounds, inflammations, burns, sore eyes, rheumatism, headaches and insect bites. They had medicine and pharmacology before the arrival of Europeans. Did you learn that in school? I didn't. Hundreds of substances used by Indigenous Peoples are now listed in the United States Pharmacopeia and the National Formulary. Some of these are in my medicine cabinet. We hear accounts of Lewis and Clark being given willow bark tea, which contains salicylate, but no story of those who taught them this anelgesic. If you google 'history of aspirin and acetylsalicylic acid' you get the story of the rich white guy in 1899 who funded its more efficient extracture and monetization.
Weed is my mainstay, followed closely by coffee and alcohol, in my usual first defenses against whatever life throws at me. I forget my own history so easily when others have their robbed from them. I know almost no Ukrainian history. I can not even begin to pronounce whatever strange Slavic ghosts my ancestors warded off in their culture and time. I know no literature, no mythology, very little language of their people. My reality is so different from theirs - college graduate saddled with debt and good intentions, working at a women's organization, multiple side gigs like proctoring and tutoring and copyediting. Lives with her boyfriend and their cat. Spends money on books and shows, laughs at internet memes, gets into long discussions about politics and music, bakes but in a hipster way. There is no room in this narrative for sober faced ancestors, ancient farmers and peasants whose challenges I can not even begin to understand. I live in this world, now, with my own troubles and hustles and insecurities.
Knowing why something is happening doesn't make you feel any better about it or make it easier to deal with. Being sick makes me think of my childhood, memories of being comforted and treated into health, a small world tended to by caring and certain adults. Now I am an adult and I am so uncertain about everything. And here is that feverish hiraeth, that longing for the home we barely remember and can't go back to.