"I dream I am walking. I dream I am eating. I dream I am running. Help! Someone is chasing me! Now I am awake."
The above quote comes from a favorite of all childhood favorite go-to-bed stories. The dog telling the story gets chased by a hot dog in his dream, and wakes up to get a drink of water. My dad loved to read us this book. Or maybe we just loved to have it read to us. It's kind of scary to think about a child dreaming about being chased by a giant running hot dog. By the way, good morning Dad. I heard you get up. You are the BDE.
I've been lying awake in my bed for at least 54 minutes, amidst flannel sheets and fluffy puffs [of pillow, blanket, and hair-do varieté], blogging in my head. I've written vast amounts, and still haven't blasted off to dreamland again, so I decided to see how much of my pre-dawn muse I can remember.
Infusion pods kind of sound science-fictiony to me. They are where you go to get infusions, of course, and there are four areas, called pods, of course. The name "infusion pods" is a creation of my own, but I have heard nurses referring to both titles frequently, so it seems an adequate combination. It also kind of sounds like a line of trip-hop clubs, or some sort of experimental edamame at a sushi place.
The infusion pods are naturally lit, fibered and floored. Each of the four pods has a big desk/nurse station in the middle, flanked on each side by 3 yellow leather recliners with built-in seat-heat and massage. The massage left me a little nonplussed. I was expecting more along the lines of, well, a massage. Nevertheless, I don't pay the big bucks for the massage. And the first time I was there, it was so cooking hot by the window that the seat-heater remained very much neglected after the initial required trial of every button on the chair.
So, once I get there, the nurses proceed to nullify for several hours my right hand of all useful power. This is done primarily by tubes, needles, tape, IVs, more tape, and a few bruises for the road. After a friendly saline flush, I'm pumped full of Benadryl and other steroids to pre-medicate me for the real juice when it comes. An IV of Benadryl is really a fairly amusing thing. First it makes your arm feel it is burning off up to your elbow, until you calmly remark along those strains to the nurse, who instantly becomes significantly more gentle in jamming it into your IV. Secondly, no matter how awake, alive, and alert you were before you had the Benadryl, you will without fail in mid-sentence discover you are
profoundly tired. It is like an ocean wave crashing over your head, forcing it back upon the yellow leather headrest, whilst hearing your own voice declare that you are going to go to sleep now. This has happened in like manner twice. I'm thinking it's a trend.
Once you're fully Benadryled, invariably an office worker with an insurance question will show up demanding all sorts of things at which you marvel the fact that you're able to use your deadened tongue to instruct her on said insurance papers' whereabouts. I also successfully requested a warm blanket, marveling again at my ability to form a thought and verbalize it in the modern vernacular. I think the thing isn't necessarily a lack of thoughts, though. Upon my first Benadrylization, I could think of nothing for the span of several minutes but baby seals, and wondered if I would remember later to tell anyone. I did.
There are also beigey natural-cardboard-cereal colored curtains in the pods, secured back out of the way most of the time, and written all over with some sort of I-guess-inspirational quotes? Kind of like "yoga is seashells are fluffy clouds" type stuff and mystical sounding sayings about peace and tranquility. I can never exactly remember what they say, even after looking at them for the span of several minutes. Maybe they're supposed to make you feel good and peaceful, but honestly they're pretty bewildering to grasp, with or without an armful of Benadryl.
There are some really heartbreaking looking people in the transfusion pods. Some without hair, some with ports installed in their chests akin to the metal plugs installed in Matrix characters heads. But here, most of them are old. I feel like a spring chicken out there, mostly. But really, it does feel like the Matrix incubation station, or the parts in Inception where everyone hooks up in a train car/hotel room/moving van/alpine bunker to share dreams. We're all hooked up to the juice, just different flavors.
I'm not an advocate for drug use, by the way. But I feel like I can really relate better to people who have undergone chemo treatments now. I've heard it said that some chemo patients lose their interest in simple things like crossword puzzles. This is not an understatement. Crossword puzzles become enormous algorithms of abstract thought when you're on chemo. Conversation is a venerable skill which you wish to remember
how it works. There are good days and bad days, of course, and I'm sure my experience has been one of the least severe on record, but it does make you feel pretty wonky.
So I read alot. I succumbed to a book of the "current uplifting fiction" department last week... and didn't have the heart to get the next 4 consecutive books out of the library, to "see how it will end." Oh, I suppose I enjoyed it while it lasted. But couldn't books written in fives be just as easily written in ones? Last week I started reading "On Writing Well." In the first three chapters or so, it lays down the law: writing is not easy; and please,
please, please edit your work ruthlessly. In general, I like it, and I intend to read more and apply it to my writing. It made me want to write concise 3-sentence, 1-paragraph blogs, until I started reading other well-edited and slightly more verbose books, which made me feel less guilty about writing long blogs on occasion, such as today. It also talks about a photograph or EB White's boathouse, in which dear tales have come to life. I want a boathouse.
I like reading books because when I like the book it seems to pervade my writing style. Last fall I read Amy Krause Rosenthal's Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, and writing became a dream. It had only vaguely occurred to me beforehand that one could write encyclopedically. That'll explain the majority of my blogs since then. It's so freeing. Now, I'm not here to push anyone's book. This particular book, and many others, have subjects and content which I personally would not have chosen to write about. But it isn't my book. And if I only read my book [or my blog, or my college essays], I'd get bored. No, you must read to become inspired. Especially read good literature. The benefits are quite vast.
I read George Orwell's
1984 a couple weeks ago, because I wanted to. Most people were forced in tenth grade to read it and get an understanding of totalitarian government. [I was forced to read Moby Dick, which, albeit the bane of my personal existence that school year, I was eventually glad to have read.] I found it interesting. I found it to be pretty much how I thought for a while. And I found it supremely depressing. Not personally, of course, because I read it and got it over with in a span of 4 days or so. It's not like it was taking over my life, or making me an advocate for an oligarchan/totalitarian regime. But I had hoped to find hope in the book, when I only found conformity and loss of ethical value and a dismal picture of what the future may have been. The most depressing thing is that they stifled all creativity and curiosity. Like, tortured it out of people until they didn't even want it anymore. Nevertheless, as with Moby Dick, I'm glad that I read it, and glad that my life is not like it.
So I started reading Eat Pray Love, on recommendation by my Canadienne cousin. I like that too. I find that I can easily like just about any well-written book. And I really
like how Elizabeth Gilbert writes. It's so alive, and humorous, and insightful, and she knows and notices the most interesting things. I
like interesting people, especially when they can write. Her views on spirituality and life in general quite differ from my own, so again, I do not read it to find my own personal view or convictions, but to see through someone else's eyes for a period of their life. I'm interested to see how the books changes as she moves on from Italy to India- it may be that Italy was my favorite part. Time will tell.
Following my initial couple of hours of Benadryl-induced naptime, I pried myself back to consciousness to eventually read. But first I had to finish my salad. Eating a salad from a Gladware container with plastic fork with your left hand whilst reclining in a yellow leather heat-massage chair while on drugs is really an amusing pastime. It really took like 99% of my concentration. My right hand, taped, IVed, tubed, etc, into oblivion, remained a dead weight/anchor upon the Gladware, and my left hand realized its supreme awkwardness at fork-wielding. Somewhere along the lines, I must have subconsciously switched from "poking" to "scooping" my salad, because it gradually became more natural. Having combined the gimpy fork hand with a fierce yet sleepy determination to chew and hopefully even taste my salad, I was probably an amusing sight to behold. I reminded myself of my 22-month-old nephew. He's really good at eating with a fork though. He loves to "poke." And he gets
really excited about peas.
Somewhere along the lines between salad and small bucket of mini Oreos, which I didn't intend to like but did, I also got to thinking about how I would most suitably travel. I have traveled a fair amount in my lifetime, but it hasn't necessarily been plotted and planned and executed in any particular manner. Oh, I've enjoyed it immensely. I really love to travel. But the more I read and learn about places and hear how other people travel, I'm developing my own style. Kind of like writing. Get inspired by the best and be who you are. Anyway, I've decided that the most suitable sort of travel companion is a Paul Child. Inquisitive, knowledgeable, relaxed, fearless, always takes the back roads, always ready for an adventure, has a steady job, willing to try any sort of cooking. I just can't decide if I'm at all like Julia, or if it matters.
I think it comes down to the fact that all good things take time, and preparation and forethought, and flexibility, and curiosity, and an overall relaxédness. That's why I probably ought to move to Paris, or Rome, or the Norwegian fjords, or Reykjavik, or Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I just really love beauty, and I really love to assimilate good things. I can't really remember anymore how I got to this point in my wobbly line of thought, but I like it, so I'm not going to purge it into obscurity by excessive editing. I always want to say "edification" instead of editing. I like edification. It means "building up." So I guess you edify the edifice of your thoughts and then you edit [tear down the nonsense] until the edition becomes edible. Ha ha, I love my thesaurus.
And now, the sun has sufficiently arisen and so shall I.
