(no subject)
What a long, strange week it's been. I have a very bad feeling I was bitten by a venomous knid while I was snoozing Wednesday night because I woke up all puffy Thursday morning. My alarm went off at 4am. I thought I had opened my eyes, yet I still couldn't see the clock. It was just a vague green shape over there somewhere. I was not especially concerned; at 4:00am I'm not expecting optimal functionality from my body. I thumped down the hall to the bathroom to begin the process of making myself beautiful for the golfers. When I looked in the mirror I realized that maybe conventionally pretty wasn't in my future today. Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who is the puffiest of them all. Why! That would be me. There was no pain, there was no ooze, there was no itching, but at some point the area around both of my eyes had decided to work on a Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man impersonation.
"Oh hell. What now?" I grumped at my over-inflated perception of self. Looks like mascara is out since I can't even find my eyelashes. They are in there...somewhere. It seems I was only puffy. I can deal with puffy, but I don't want to freak out the golfers or spread something nasty to them (well, actually, I wouldn't mind spreading something mildly annoying to a few of them). I have an hour, let's try ice and aloe to see if I can deflate me a bit. It mostly worked. By 5:40am I looked like I had had a little too much fun the night before. Even though I didn't find any marks and didn't have any itching, I think I had an encounter with a spider. I felt kind of high and a little whoosy all day. The fun of a hangover without having had the fun.
It wasn't until I was driving home around 12:30pm feeling lopsided, that I remembered that they make drugs for this sort of thing. Oh! Yeah! I can take a pill and it might help. I took some Benadryl. That's when I really knew something was off. I seem to be extremely resilient to pain and suffering, and rarely need to take something. Good thing because most drugs don't do a damn thing. I had tried diphenhydramine as a sedative. I might has well have been popping M&Ms. Not this time! Ah! Is this why people are warned not to drive on this stuff? I substituted one high for another, but now less lopsided and more zoned. The last few days I think I now know how a koala bear feels: very zoned and a bit cranky because nothings feels quite right.
Yesterday most of the puffiness had vanished. I still felt a long way from center. But I didn't have any trouble teaching my sections of the Aquarium 101 class. It was probably just as well I was in a hippy-dippy sort of mind place. One of the other people teaching the class was a bit bothersome. But being in "stoned koala" mode I just kind of ignored him. We were stuck teaching a section together (sharing a section doesn't exactly make sense because they are only twenty minutes long). First, he didn't quite seem to get that my name is not "TJ". I've eliminated six letters from my name to make it more convenient, I'm also wearing a name tag, is it really that hard to get two letters right? And he did a couple other things that kind of put me in an awkward spot, but I just flipped things around into harmless jokes so it didn't bother me (I improvised iambic pentameter once, so I think I can handle an annoying old fossil's idea of "witty". He really isn't a bad guy, and I was very pleased with myself for not turning the humor back on him, even though it was tempting), and I went back to chewing on my metaphorical eucalyptus. I figured I wasn't too stoned (or maybe I was) since I got a round of applause after my solo section.
I came home after eight hours at the Aquarium and belly-flopped into bed. I slept for almost two hours. Now I was certain something was off! I spent the rest of the evening indulging in popcorn and holiday-comfort-movie watching. Getting up this morning to run might have been amusing to watch from a safe distance. Elena was still having some back trouble: Limpy and the Stoned. We managed our time and distance goals, but only barely. Then I went to play on the swings.