7 Unrelated Things In a List Brought On By the Flu

I'm suffering from what can only be described as a body migraine over the last two days, so, while what I really want to write about are why lamentations about the the death of the supposed heart of blogging are misplaced and the inherent bigotry behind some people's desire for gender segregation at female dominated blogging conferences, I can't, because the first few parts of this sentence have already stripped out the few coherent word combinations I can handle right now.



Oh noes.

But fear not, reader. I will not go gentle into that good night. I am fighting this beast with mass quantities of ibuprofen and water and kitten cuddles and oh who am I kidding? I just threw up in an old popcorn bowl.

Really, I'm just asking for sympathy here. I staved this thing off all through the BlogHer '12 conference, and this is the price I have to pay for my troubles.

[From that last sentence to the one after this aside, insert TWO HOURS of writhing in pain, the loss of 24 hours worth of food and water, bloating up like I was nine months pregnant, and crying about the stabbing pains in my head. Oh, the joys!]

I am still refusing to go gently with this damn flu, but all I have the gumption for is a list, so here goes:

1. I went to BlogHer '12, and, although I know BlogHer recaps are your very favourite of things, all I can tell you right now is that it was fast and fulfilling and exhausting and bountiful and it gave me the flu.
2. Lula's new trick is to peel all the bandaids off my feet with her teeth while I succumb to fevered dreams about Bret Michaels' burial at sea. She's disgusting.
3. We delivered our letter of offer on a home we really want to be ours, which I don't need to tell you, because you can pretty much assume that if we are going to go through the work of delivering a letter of offer on a home, we probably actually want it.
4. I feel much better about that carrot cake cookie sandwich filled with cream cheese icing that I didn't eat earlier, because that would have made all the throwing up I'm doing even sadder than it already is.
5. Tomorrow afternoon, I have to make myself look like I'm not half-dead with the flu so that the bank will give us money. The bank loves self-employed ladies who look all wilty, right?
6. This point's just a thank you for reading this. You're sweet.
7. I'm listening to the Palinode crunch on Triscuits right now, and everytime I think about punching him, I just say "I love you" instead. This is my number one piece of marriage advice.

And now I'm off to bed with my puke bucket. I've named it Sweet Baby because of all the time I spend stroking it.

Good night!

Grace in Small Things: Sunday Edition #101 (aka The Day After Our 11th Wedding Anniversary)

1. That I married the Palinode



2. That eleven years later, I love him more and like him more than I did even on the day I married him



3. That my struggles through depression, anxiety, cancer, employment, and sobriety have done nothing to shake him



4. That he is funny and absurd and has the fantastic ability to laugh, even in the worst situations



5. That he will marvel at the cheeziest things with me, like rainbows after supper, and kiss me after noting it

A Jaw-Dropping Miracle of Meat and Electricity

One of the first conversations I ever had with the Palinode, a conversation which occurred over seven years before we finally started dating, was about books.



I may have been engaged to another man at the time, and I may have been fooling around with the friend who introduced the Palinode and I — I was, shall we say, a lover and not a fighter in those days — but damn if that Palinode didn't seem like a fine human being, and one of my tests for fineness back then was to ask about books. If a person hemmed, hawed, or looked in any way confused by the question, they were deemed Not Fine.

"What book should I read next above all others?" I asked him.

"Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian," the Palinode answered without hesitation.

And he was, indeed, deemed to be Very Fine.

More than seven years after that conversation, we dated, and almost a year after that, we were married, and about a month or two into our marriage, we were sitting around in our apartment together talking about books again when he suddenly looked like he'd remembered something important.

"What is it?" I asked.

"I just remembered one of my favourite passages in fiction," he said. "Would you like to hear it?"

"I would love to," I said.

I expected him to get up off the floor to find the book the passage was in, but no.

"It's from Blood Meridian, pages 51 to 53," he said, as though it were the most normal thing in the world to remember that kind of thing, and then his eyes looked up at the ceiling for a moment, and then he looked at me and recited this section of Blood Meridian from memory:

The first of the herd began to swing past them in a pall of yellow dust, rangy slatribbed cattle with horns that grew agoggle and no two alike and small thin mules coalblack that shouldered one another and reared their malletshaped heads above the backs of the others and then more cattle and finally the first of the herders riding up the outer side and keeping the stock between themselves and the mounted company. Behind them came a herd of several hundred ponies. The sergeant looked for Candelario. He kept backing along the ranks but could not find him. He nudged his horse through the column and moved up the far side. The lattermost of the drovers were now coming through the dust and the captain was gesturing and shouting. The ponies had begun to veer off from the herd and the drovers were beating their way toward this armed company met with on the plain. Already you could see through the dust on the ponies' hides the painted chevrons and the hands and rising suns and birds and fish of every device like the shade of old work through sizing on a canvas and now too you could hear above the pounding of the unshod hooves the piping of the quena, flutes made from human bones, and some among the company had begun to saw back on their mounts and some to mill in confusion when up from the offside of those ponies rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies. A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armour of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Oh my god, said the sergeant. ¹

OH MY GOD, I thought in my head.

I stared at him in silence.

"Oh, you didn't like it," he said.

"No, I loved it. That was like incredible poetry."

I remembered our conversation about that book from eight years before and decided that I had just landed in one of three situations:

a) This was a sign that I had married the right person.
b) I was in way over my head, and he should totally divorce me for someone who knows stuff.
c) I had married either a robot or a highly intelligent alien-human hybrid sent to infiltrate the species.

Ten-and-a-half years later, a full eighteen-and-a-half years since we met, I think the correct answer was A. He still knows a ludicrous amount of information — really, his brain is a jaw-dropping miracle of meat and electricy — but he's kind enough not to mock me for having trouble remembering the word for butter, and that, my friends, is love.

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¹ Cormac McCarthy. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West. 1985. p. 51–53.