Saturday, October 24, 2009

In Which I Hate My Life

I am, unfortunately, every so often the victim of migraine headaches. Most of the time I get the tell-tale aura splotches of corrupted vision and react accordingly: rush to the store, buy a Red Bull or three, sprint home, chug an ibuprofen per Red Bull, and lie down and try to sleep. As I discovered on Sunday, sometimes whatever chemical imbalance it is that causes migraines (I think the Man who Makes the Totentanz Go ‘Round and I are in contract negotiations, and that’s really why it happened, but anyway, sometimes --) the migraine doesn’t go according to plan.

We walked back to American Embassy 2.0 from a café (where I had tea, for once in my life; I wonder what would have happened if I had consumed caffeine in coffee form) and I felt a headache come on, thought that I might ask Briullov for something in drug form, even though I try not to overmedicate when it’s just a light headache. (I get pretty frequent headaches and think, in general, we overmedicate. Especially ADHD/badly-disciplined children. We don’t need no thought control. Another post entirely, surely, that.) By the time we got there I had forgotten.

Bad move number one. And then, [stupid stupid stupid] I wondered why it was that while we were watching Top Chef. every so often I felt my vision blur, or it felt a little bit like nausea in my abdomen.

And then I tried to read an article on my computer, and I almost threw up from the death pain that started throbbing in my head. The night blurs for me– it was around 10:45, and I knew drinking a Red Bull, while perhaps solving my headache woes temporarily, would destroy my soul with its Siren Song that would play at 1535237589 dB throughout the night in my skull, keeping me from sleep. The metro lights were too bright for me, and I remember seeing things through half-lidded eyes; I was scared I’d pass out if I closed them completely.

But the sounds. The sounds were so much more alive and present and throbbing. The screeching train brakes against the tracks, the hum of the fluorescent lights, the doors crashing open and shut like evil Satan anti-oceanic waves. One’s sense of smell, apparently, is also heightened (this must be what it’s like to be pregnant) and I had to sprint away from the trash and broken beer bottles at the metro entrance, from the usually-enticing late-night pyshki [Soviet-style donut] place at the corner.

Somehow I crawled into my bed and curled into the fetal position and fell asleep.

As I write this, back to being sane [relatively speaking, here] of mind and hale of body, I’m listening to a Sandbox podcast from mid-August and had a sad moment. They were playing a game to give away tickets to The Killers playing in Boston.

I blogged about that.

I missed that.

Blin.

ROD

blin - pancake. Also: mild swear word.

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