Poison

Sigh.

My body hurts, aches with a dull knotted insistent pain. My eyes are sensitive to light, and focusing is more difficult than normal. My sleep is unsettled, and I wake feeling unrested, regardless of how long I "slept." I feel like there's a fog in my head, a dull edge scraping everything, and I can't think straight or focus fully. My short-term memory is fizzling away again. My skin is angry, and it shows on my face. My GI tract is gurgley and painful, and I've essentially lost my appetite for appetite, because it's so unpleasant to digest right now. Not to mention that no matter what I eat, I feel like I'm eating wrong, like my body's not getting what it needs regardless. I'm emotionally on edge, super sensitive and worryable. And I don't know how to deal with people - I don't have the energy or clarity to handle social interactions, so all I feel like doing is hiding, but I don't have the concentration to read (mostly - except for that one book, from which, unfortunately, pieces are already missing in my memory) so I stick a mindless movie in my computer or just sit on my bed staring into space and muttering to myself.

Add all this up? Yup, I'm poisoned. I think it's been the slow boil - trace and ubertrace amounts adding up over the past few weeks to the point where my body is just plain ticked and I feel awful. I don't think it's been any of my food, per se - I think everything I've bought and eaten has been safe. I'm getting super careful about that. I think it's the crumbs all over my kitchen, the things on the burners and stovetops, my dishes getting used, or washed by someone who may or may not have used the correct sponge (and who's to say - perhaps my sponge got used on the normal dishes and is now contaminating everything it touches?!) or didn't wash their hands after touching bread or other dirty dishes, or maybe the sink needs thorough cleaning, as does the stove, or the bags of bread sitting in our hallways spewing crumbs, and of course the table, oh, and anything with gluten MUST stay away from my food in the fridge! It could be, and probably is, any number of things, all added together to equal badness 10,000. Stupid gluten, how I hate thee!

I love this house. I REALLY want to keep living here. But if I can't work out a way to keep safe, I'll have to move. I can't live here if I'll be poisoned all the time. I want it to not matter, I want people to not have to learn new habits, to learn to be more careful, to be able to do and eat and make whatever they want and not have to worry about keeping it away from me & my dishes or having to clean up immediately so that I don't have to avoid the kitchen. I hate this. I hate the inconvenience. I hate how anti-social it is, how picky, how authoritative I'm afraid I'll have to be to get it through people's heads. BUT. (There's always a but.) I hate how I feel even more. I can feel it destroying me. Literally. I hate what gluten does to me enough that I'll do whatever needs to be done to avoid it.

Even if that means leaving all my friends here and finding a new place to live.

Footsteps on the Roof

Rain. Now that the ides of March approach, the skies deluge us with cold rain. It feels like winter to me, like mid-January back in the redwoods, chill and damp. But we don't have a wood fire here to keep us warm. I think rain is beautiful. Yes, it's grey, but it's far better than the grey when it's cloudy and windy and threatening snow without delivering. Rain washes everything, makes it shine under the street lights, makes the colors deeper, richer, more saturated. Drainage here is wretched, though, so huge puddles collect all over the roads. I love the sound. I love hearing rain parade on my car, volume variant depending on wind gusts. I love sitting in church hearing the little feet on the roof. It's like the angels were dancing a hoe-down tonight. And I love lying in my bed with the winding rushing by, flattening sheets of water against the walls and windows, splattering from the gutters to the pavement, and soothing cacophony of precipitation. Snow is silent, and wonderful in its way of silencing everything else, too. Rain doesn't muffle; it drowns out. I can't hear the noises of the roads because the rain's sound is louder. And I'd far rather hear the rain. So I smile.

I made chocolate chip coconut cookie muffins the yesterday. I wanted sweets, didn't have any, decided I wanted chocolate chip cookies, thought I should add shredded coconut, and realized I probably shouldn't use the one cookie sheet in this house, since it's got stuff burnt onto it from who knows what glutenous things. All I have are bread pans and muffin tins. So I used the muffin tin to keep my cookies poison-free. They turned out reasonably well, considering that I literally threw a bunch of ingredients in a bowl and mixed it up, adding enough water so that it seemed a decent consistency. No recipe, not even as a guideline. But they taste good, aren't dry, aren't flat, and although a bit floury for cookies, are good heated up as dessert muffins. I'm going to get good at this. I hope.

I don't quite feel ready for this week. It shall be very busy, very energy-consuming. My body is still weary, and my mind a bit fuzzy. But the week must be lived regardless. And I want to do it all. I'm not going to be occupied with things I hate, or even dislike. They are challenging things, new things, old things, draining things, but not unpleasant. I'm sure it will squoosh by too quickly to keep track, but that's alright. I don't need to keep track. I don't need to keep tabs on how well every single little thing goes. I need to do what must be done - what I have chosen to make a responsibility - and take care of myself, eat well, sleep enough, relax, and see how I turn up at the other end. No worrying permitted past this point. I won't do FINE (freaked-out, insecure, neurotic, emotional), I will do well. With hope and persistence.

Rain sing me to sleep.

Speak, Sunshine

I just sat on my back porch in the sun (warm!) for almost an hour and a half. Then came inside and made a quesadilla with (gluten-free!) whole-grain wrap, (casein-free!) cheddar cheese, red pepper and oregano. Tasty. I still don't trust the weather not to revert back to its frozen ways, but today is gorgeous and warm. I may have actually gotten a little color from it, and my body thoroughly unchilled. It felt good.

Two of the girls from work and I went to see Sherlock Holmes at the downtown theater last night. There's a doorman, footmen, and someone playing the piano in the lobby. The theater itself is old, and wide, with a balcony (not open, alas) and crazy Rococo-Greek-Mycenaean-Victorian gold and white decor. The screen up front is slightly smaller than in a normal movie theater - or perhaps it just seems that way because it's smaller then the stage, and bordered by draping curtains. I love the atmosphere in that place. And the movie was fun. Good action, pretty explosions, witty repartee, great character interactions, and curious science. I wasn't expecting anything in particular, and was pleased. I must say that although I imagined a slightly more emaciated Sherlock with a thin, bony nose, Robert Downey's got the feel down wonderfully. I believe him as a Sherlock. And the Watson-Holmes interactions were brilliant and hilarious and real. 'Twas a satisfactorily spent 8 dollars.

Thursday I made muffins. I don't know what came over me... I just started pulling all my nearly-empty bags of flour mixes out of the cupboard and mixing them together. I used four (maybe five) different flour mixes, plus a hot cereal mix, so my muffins probably contained a good 8 different grains and starches. Plus a little salt, brown sugar, xanthan gum, baking soda, molasses, agave nectar, almond milk, ground flax seed & water (instead of egg)... They were gluten-free, vegan muffins, completely off-the-cuff. Fortunately I've made muffins enough times to know the approximate general consistency of muffin batter, so I added enough water to match that, plus a little to offset the expected absorption by the hot cereal mix. The result? Wonderfully textured and moistured muffins, with a hearty flavor. They're actually really good. I'll never be able to duplicate them, but I am encouraged all the same - I can make muffins without a recipe! Little things...

Like going to bed before midnight the past two nights... And sleeping past 6am this morning. This whole sleep schedule thing is still screwed up, and my body is not pleased with my general lack of sound sleep. One bonus to my church's new service time is: I can sleep in Sunday morning! I just need to not stay up correspondingly late the night before. Alack and alas.

I find myself wanting to find some books on semiotics or linguistics to read; strike that, to study. It almost feels like I've got a bunch of puzzle pieces spread out before me, but it's an extraordinarily difficult puzzle, and there are a few rules that I don't know yet, a few key hints that have eluded me. I don't expect semantics or semiotics or philosophy or linguistic analysis or anything to just put all the pieces together for me, but I want to know more. Words fascinate me; how words go together to make language, to follow and form communication, catches my attention. I remember this coming up in literary criticism; I remember connecting it with philosophy. Attempts to explain where and how things came from are interesting to me. It's funny, I like philosophy not because I expect answers, but because I like how it contains pieces of answers, which, when connected with something else, make the picture of why and where and how a little more clear. I like process. I recognize it as both an underpinning reality and a formulative necessity. Things change, they develop, they shift and grow. Nothing here is static. There is a flow, but it's such a complicated flow that I can't just sit on my porch and trace it all out. I want to connect theoretical physics with language. They are related, I'm convinced of that; I just want to figure out how. Patterns. Patterns of chaos, chaos of patterns.

Sigh. I miss school. But recognize that our society's patterns have rendered it impossible to avoid the stultifying, wearying grind of work without already being in possession of vast quantities of money. I can't afford school. And work renders me less capable of thinking deeply or concertedly. It dulls me, tires me, makes me prefer escape or distraction to engagement and concentration. I wish it weren't like this, but it is.

I need to write more poetry.