Jan
30

Coming To You Live From A River In Egypt…

Saturday night the Nearly and I went with my mother and cousin to see Eartha Kitt, who looks better at 79 than I do now, thank you very much. She hiked up her skirt to do a spry Charleston at one point and I nearly collapsed with envy. Perhaps she has prosthetic legs, and that is why they look like a cartoon of svelte shapeliness, but I doubt it. I read an interview with her, written a week ago—just after her 79th birthday—and in it she revealed that she had recently given up boxing because it was “hurting her hands.” I—just after my 26th birthday—gave up dieting because it was sapping my will to live.
Contrast and compare.
It was a lovely concert, although the dinner before (at a frou frou French place near the hall) tried my patience. Each menu item had six or seven anachronistic ingredients—at least one of which I did not like or did not recognize. It isn’t enough for pan-seared skate to have dried cherries and a fennel confit, apparently–it must also be stuffed with chocolate ganache and sweetbreads. And lest you think I was being picky or provincial, I’ll have you know that I know my frisee from my marrons glace, and I like a good confit as much as the next girl. But honestly, what ever happened to lamb chops? Or creamed spinach?
I ended up having wild boar in a pan sauce of Lambic beer and raspberry. Yes, that’s right. Wild boar sautéed in raspberries and beer.
No, I am not kidding.

That night I woke up with some sort of blood sugar crisis—panic attack, nausea, digestive problems, uncontrollable shaking. This hasn’t happened for a while, and I am not sure what set it off—not enough protein? Dessert (cocoa brioche, brown-sugared filberts, crème fraiche, semisweet chocolate and coffee glaze)?
I passed the hours from one to six a.m. on the couch watching HGTV (which I find mysteriously soothing) whilst nibbling on a saltine and gobbling benzodiazepenes.
The remainder of Sunday was spent weak, clammy, and functioning on two hours of sleep. Well, “functioning” might be a strong word. I figured out how to download Yahoo !nstant Messenger and watched part of Pillow Talk while I ate a peanut butter sandwich. I’m sure Eartha Kitt spent Sunday exhausting a cadre of lovers before going for a brisk run, but probably she’ll die soon, so it all evens out in the end.

Monday has been an eventful day already:
1. I found a small, hard lump where the top of my right ear meets my skull. It is somewhat painful when pressed on obsessively, and because the arm of my glasses rests atop it, I am very aware of its presence. Obviously, it is lymphatic cancer. Or, I suppose, a swollen lymph node indicating pervasive systemic infection.
2. This morning I was in a car accident. Dinah and I were rear-ended by a large truck, causing my neck to jolt about unpleasantly, and my mind to reflect upon how apt is the term “whiplash.” I pulled over, and the truck pulled up behind me, and I promptly started to cry, out of shock and because I was certain the driver would be a tall, rough-hewn man of the sort who could toss me up in the air for sport, a man on his way to a job laying railroad track or constructing something. He would be angry, this man, red-faced with yelling at me for stopping too quickly, and I clutched the steering wheel, ready to peel out if he went back to his truck for a shotgun.
But, as it turns out, the driver was a woman I work with, whom I quite like, and who has PCOS. We exchanged rather-more-profuse-than-necessary Midwestern apologies, hugged, and went our separate ways. She will pay for Dinah to get the miniscule scratch on her backside fixed, and I suppose if I drop dead later today from an embolism, she will pay my funeral expenses as well.
3. I am being moved from my vast office to a tiny cubicle. A tiny cubicle on the edge of a walkway. There has been a bit of a shake-up, and they need my vast office for an attorney. They were very apologetic about the whole thing, but apologies don’t give me a place to store my stacks and stacks of pages. Apologies don’t give me space to whirl around in my desk chair after everyone else has gone home.

Thank you all for your comments on my last entry. I was initially afraid of posting about said issue, but then got all stroppy and reminded myself that if I can talk about my cervix on the Internet, surely my feelings can’t be far behind. I will, of course, keep you updated, but for now I am sunning myself on the banks of Denial, enjoying the musical whining of the wind playing upon my tautly stretched nerves…

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |