Flotsam

SOME LIFE LESSONS:
• The busy season at work is not a good time to move.
• A month during which you are moving is not a good month to start school.
• The weeks during which you are starting school are probably not the best weeks to be obsessively charting your infertility signs in order to determine the efficacy of recent drug treatment.

• Doing all these things at once is the stupidest idea you will ever have.

It is an odd feeling, to have simultaneously not enough and too much time. I want the month to go by quickly, so that I can stop spending so much time with my cervix, and yet I want the world to cease turning, so that I have more time to pack. I am willing things to speed up and slow down all at once, and you can imagine how well THAT is working out. Aside from the fact that I have had very little luck in the past willing the universe to do anything, it is difficult to rend the fabric of time in two opposing directions.

Also, I am fairly certain I have been the victim of Voodoo. Wednesday night, I was sleeping–just lying there, all peaceful-like–when something stabbed into my calf. I lurched awake with an “EeeeeeEEEEEEEEEoooooooaaarrrrrrgggg!” clutching frantically at the Nearly with one hand while the other groped toward the offending leg. My first thought, naturally, was that I had been bitten by a large and hungry Rat, who had been overcome with a desire for girl-flesh upon glimpsing the succulent meat of my upper ankle. But the pain continued, and as I writhed (wrothe?) about, I deduced that there was no rat wound at all, and that my calf muscle was merely engaged in some sort of epileptic fit. The fit passed, but I was left with a LIMP that has persisted for 48 HOURS.
Now, I am not athletic, so it seems highly unlikely that this was a “muscle cramp.” It is far more probable that someone is practicing Voodoo upon me from afar, and had chosen that moment to thrust a pin into a doll-sized Alexa, fashioned from corn husks and twine.

But other than my issues with the temporal, and Voodoo, and the faint thrumming of anxiety behind my sternum, I am holding up quite well, largely due to my excellent coping strategies:
• I have been attempting to Delegate, by which I mean I bullied the Nearly into putting gas in my car while I stayed home to watch Gilmore Girls.
• I am trying to transition from my usual short, panting gasps to some sort of breathing system wherein I actually take in enough oxygen for all of my cells.
• I am making lists. Many, many lists.

Some of you were kind enough to offer moving suggestions–clever things like using your clothes to pack breakables rather than tediously wrapping newspaper around each champagne glass. Most intriguing, though, was Jul’s suggestion of a Treo 650. I am always on the lookout for some material thing on which I can fixate as the solution to all my problems, and the Treo is perfect–a phone/camera/email/internet/word processor all in one shiny, button-y package. Surely, if I had one of these, I could keep up with my homework, update my blog more often, take a picture of the hateful girl at work who wears the belled peasant skirt (a picture to send to the hit man I will hire via cell phone, of course), and still have time to Google “Metformin ovulate help help.” Alas, I cannot afford such an extravagance until after the move. Currently I am considering taping a phone and a camera to a notebook, in an attempt to craft myself a cheaper facsimile. Wish me luck!