awol

I am really having trouble continuing to post to this blog while also maintaining any semblance of a life. And that despite the unusual number of days off we wage slaves have enjoyed this month -- seven so far, and another two this coming week.

Two weeks ago I visited our local 2nd-hand English book store and picked up The Corrections for 10 shekels (just over two bucks!) and Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina for another 10. I was very pleased, and rapidly devoured Emma Bovary over the next few days, including a couple of lunchtimes on the grass, eschewing all other social contact.

Reading fiction is like my addiction to jelly beans, which is probably why I haven't done it much in the past 20 years. When I get into a good book, I don't want to put it down for anything, not work, not sleep, not feeding the kid/husband and certainly not going to the gym. So I've really been neglecting everything lately, not just this blog.

Right after that, I dove into the [strangely familiar] world of the dysfunctional Lambert family that is Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. A couple of years ago, while working at a mega-bookstore where I could read anything I wanted, I'd read about 30 pages of this bestseller after reading about the Oprah kerfuffle (she'd chosen it for her book club, and author Franzen was apparently dismayed at the thought of his high literature being embraced by the hoi polloi and didn't have the good sense to keep his arrogance to himself, resulting in the great-and-powerful O backing off in understandable affront; this is my memory of the story, anyway). I guess I just wasn't in the right frame of mind to get into it at that time.

But this time I was, and it gave me such a falling-through-the-rabbit-hole sort of feeling. At certain angles, when I squinted, I felt that I was reading about my own oddball family, and about myself and what I'm doing in the world. It's a challenging read, but rewarding. As I approached the final pages of this 560-page tome, I dreaded its ending -- I always feel so eager, yet so sad to come to the end of a book-relationship -- and, though I'd felt little conscious emotion throughout the book, upon reading the last line, promptly burst into tears. It clearly hit a very precise point. Literary acupuncture. Well done.

In the midst of all this reading, and coinciding with last week's holiday, I had a three-day migraine. As I've noted before, my hormone level just prior to and during my period is clearly the source of this plague, and I've searched in vain so far for solutions that don't involve the big guns of BigPharma. I've now found a new possibility in 5-HTP, which I read about in the blog of someone who's using it instead of Prozac (it's a good natural anti-depressant, apparently, and who can't use more of that?) but it's not sold here, so I had to order it online from the States and will therefore have to pay a bundle extra in customs duty when it arrives. But if it works, who cares? It's unfortunate that when I'm most sensitive to the migraines is also the time when I'm most susceptible to junk food and sugar cravings, which certainly exacerbate the migraines. I didn't resist at all this time, and the results were like Katrina, Rita and Wilma combined: natural disaster cubed.

There are some things just seem out of my control.