It is July first, and I have influenza. Swine flu has been all over the media, but I have no idea which flu I have. It's just the flu. Knocked flat in the span of a few hours by a fever and aches and a bad, deep cough. I was feeling off but well enough to go to choir rehearsal last night. By midday today I was running a 101.5° F fever and choking up a lung.

Now I'm not an alarmist, and I tend to see these flu scares as just that—scares. But the last time I got the flu, (in January, in the winter, when you're supposed to get the flu, if you're gonna get it) I tried to tough it out and ended up in the ER. So this time I called the doctor right away. Of course my pulmonologist is out of town until July eighth. Of course.

Lucky for me my endocrinologist is familiar enough with me and my special immune system that I could go see her instead. $117 later—and that's with prescription insurance, and not counting the $125 for the doctor visit—I have a new antibiotic and five days of Tamiflu, that antiviral you're supposed to start within 30 hours of getting the flu. So now I'm a statistic, one of those weird, sad people who gets the flu in summer.

Let me just say that fever plus hot weather sucks.

Also I didn't get to go out for sushi with my friend Anet, and I won't get to spend tomorrow afternoon hanging out with my friend amethyst73, because obviously I don't want to expose either of them to the flu. I think I am perfectly justified in feeling sorry for myself over this.

It's time to write a morning page. It's morning, for a given definition of morning, which in my case is the time after waking up from a long sleep, as opposed to a short nap. Since some people work all night and sleep days, myself included at times, I've got two definitions of morning: the conventional one that encompasses sunup to noon, and my personal one: the hours after I wake. My own natural rhythm has me falling asleep around three in the morning and waking around eleven. So this is my morning. And since it's morning, it's time to write that morning page. Today's morning page is about morning routines.

( After stumbling to the bathroom to pee, my morning so far looked like this: )

So how about you? What is it like for you, when you wake after a night's sleep?

I am hungry. It is almost time for me to get to work on some writing. I know, I think, soup! I will heat a can of pasta soup, which will fuel my writing and fill me with yummy goodness. I open the can and pour the contents into the saucepan. I see that the stock pot is in the way, on the burner I wish to use. I move the empty stockpot to the back burner. I put the saucepan on the front burner. I turn on the burner. I walk away. Soup from a can is capable of heating without constant supervision, I reason, and I have things to do, like play with the rats.

I am hungry. The soup should be hot now, yay! I return to the kitchen. There is a complete failure to bubble of the soup. It is not even warmish. It is, in a word, cold. I pout at it and turn up the heat. And go back to the computer. Reading metaquotes is totally writing-related. Totally.

I am hungry. Seriously, the soup had better be hot now. I can smell a warm cooking sort of scent. I return to the kitchen. The soup is not bubbling. It is not even slightly warm. It is, in fact. exactly the same temperature it was when I opened the can.

The empty stock pot, however, is BLAZING.

I have lived in this apartment nearly three years. I'm no gourmet cook, but my use of the stove is certainly, at this point, commensurate with expert level use. I still do shit like this and turn on the wrong burner. Clearly the layout of the knobs is faulty, as the knob-to-burner mapping is neither obvious nor memorable, even after three years of use.

I am HUNGRY. I pout, move the blazing stock pot to the sink. Move the saucepan to the hot burner. And write in my LJ while I wait.

*sigh*

EDIT: In the time it takes to write this, I ignore the soup. Now there is burned pasta on the bottom of the saucepan. *double sigh* But at least I have hot soup!

Look upon this wondrous thing! A flowchart, of a sort, of the arguments for and against gay marriage as transcribed from Facebook polls.

It's really a lovely, succinct little thing. Made me laugh.

Happy Pride Week Everyone. And congratulations to everyone who got married between June and November 2008, gay, straight, or otherwise identified. May your unions be blessed.

( A morning page, of a sort, about vacuum cleaner design and other inconsequential things. )

Thankful for: Google Docs revision history, Momo, being online when Carcinya needed me, Mom being 1/3 of the way through her chemo, roasted barley ice tea (mugi cha),) Order of the Stick, Sinfest, the internet.

I'm taking a leaf out of jbmcdragon's book and writing some stuff out that has been festering, in hopes that writing it will get it out of my head and out of my chest, where it's been strangling me.

( Disorderly thoughts about jealousy )

So... Do I feel better?

Sort of.

I don't much care for the taste of tail.

99.9° F is a lame fever. If you're gonna make me feel feverish and unhappy, go all the way to 100, don't act like a desperate discount store trying to fool me into thinking I'm getting it cheap by lopping off that extra digit. Of course in Celsius it's even more lame: 37.7° C.

It's probably just allergies. Spent the evening with friends who have multiple cats, reading Stories, which was awesome. But yeah, fever. We're totally saying this is allergies, taking more Benedryl and going to bed. And I want no more fevers, you hear? I have to sing at church in the morning, and Momo's coming to visit tomorrow night. So none of this playing at sick, got that body? I won't have it.

I have had a shitty day. This is me pitching a childish fit. This is me not liking myself. This is me feeling like I have no options and no way out. This is me feeling like polyamory is insane, because I can't even manage poly-platonicy. This is me wishing I was a better person.

This is fucking insane. Is there any way to be true to yourself that doesn't involve hurting other people?

This is me going away to eat pizza with jbmcdragon and try not to end up crying into my root beer.

***HOURS LATER***

I have had a much better evening. This is me feeling a whole lot less insane. JB is a really good friend.

For some reason lately, the subject of apology keeps coming up in one context or another. A variety of friends have had issues with apologies, anger, and interpersonal issues lately. It's also come up for characters in a storyline I'm writing in Fallen Leaves. It's gotten me thinking about apologies in general.

( Some thoughts on the nature of apologies. )

My freshman year of college I was a geology major, so I have a soft spot in my heart for geologists and geophysicists already, but here is one who absolutely rocks my socks. Maria Brumm, a Seattle geophysicist, explains, with diagrams, how gay marriage causes earthquakes.

When you stop writing posts, and then try to start again, it feels like trying to start off a drag race with your tires melted to the tarmac.

Can you tell I've been watching a lot of Top Gear (British car show) lately? messypeaches is the one who got me into watching it, and much as I don't need another thing to Tivo, I'm glad of it. Top Gear is brain candy. The hosts are hilarious, it's segmented so you don't really have to think hard, and I've learned a lot about cars (which I didn't think I cared about before, and still don't care about, really. Much. Really... I want an orange metal flake Tesla Roadster.)

So where am I going with this post? Nowhere. Nowhere at all. My friend Anet tells me Mercury is in retrograde. Perhaps that's what's behind the upheaval I've been having lately. I seem to know a lot of people going through crisis of one sort or another right now, and I'm trying to be a good friend, a wise counselor, a steady and sane touch pole, and not lose my own equilibrium in the process. I wish I was as calm and mature as I'm capable of pretending to be.

Since I don't want to do an infodump on what I've been doing lately, instead I will talk about the video game my doctor's office got. That's right, video game. Evidently the state of the art in asthma management is nitric oxide measurement. When my doctor said to me, "I want to do a nitric oxide test on you today" I was momentarily looking forward to it, until he explained that it's nitrous oxide that the dentist uses to get you high. Nitric oxide is just a gas created by inflammatory cell metabolism. So measuring nitric oxide in your exhalation can give you an idea about how much inflammation is in your lungs. Inflammation = bad, in case you didn't assume that. Cool, huh?

So anyway, you breathe into this tube and exhale slowly and steadily, and it measures how much nitric oxide there is in one exhalation, in parts per billion. The thing is, you have to exhale slowly and steadily. So the machine has a user interface to tell you you are doing it right. It has two modes. There's the normal, boring medical device mode, where you have to keep the arrow in the green zone. But the machine has a full color LCD, and here's where the other mode comes in. Bowling mode. Beautifully rendered in 3-D, with your choice of ball (I chose swirly blue, but red with flames and watery green were also options.) You have to keep the ball in the center of the lovely polished wood lane, and if you do it all the way to the end, you get a strike. Yay!

Normal is 0 to 10 ppb of NO. I had 32, which is not great, so that means I'm switching inhaled steroid dose a bit. Anyway, though, it was cool. And the tech was invented here in Menlo Park. Anyway. Maybe tomorrow I'll write a substantive post.

California's Supreme Court ruled to uphold Prop 8, the amendment to the constitution that bans same-sex marriage. I expected it, so why does it still feel like a kick in the teeth? Maybe because I allowed myself to hope. I hoped that a court that had ruled discrimination against same-sex couples unconstitutional would see that changing the constitution to do an end run around their ruling was, in fact, an unconstitutional change. The sort of fundamental change to the constitution that California's legal system requires be handled by the legislature, not a simple majority vote of the populace.

Obviously I was wrong.

I didn't think I'd be so upset by this. I really thought I'd handle it beautifully, just like I handled the whole Prop 8 thing back in November. I thought I'd be the one cheerleading and telling people we can try again in 2010. I thought I'd be looking at Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Maine, and Iowa—corn-belt, bible-thumping Iowa—for heaven's sake, and saying "See, the country can change, Just have hope."

I was wrong.

I'm pissed and hurt, and I don't even want to go to the noon service my church is holding for people to deal with the decision, or the peaceful rally at seven in San Mateo that I promised to go to. I want to pout and snarl, refuse to wash my hair or get dressed, and stay at home and have a tantrum.

I know. I'll get over it.

But dammit! The implications for the constitution as a whole really bother me. The law says that to fundamentally alter the tenets of the state constitution, the proposed amendment must be passed by a 2/3 majority vote in the state legislature. Declaring a minority (LGBTQ people) to have fewer rights (the right to marry) than the majority is such a fundamental change, but it was made based on a simple majority vote by the populace on a general election ballot. I said it before, and I say it again: If we can lose this right now, who is going to lose what rights next? Will Spanish-speakers lose the right to obtain driver's licenses? Will Jews lose the right to public education? Will Blacks lose the right to privacy?

I know we can change this, and we will change this, eventually. Or maybe the world will so thoroughly go to shit it won't matter. With a global Depression looming, radical despots having nuclear weapons, climate change threatening mass starvation and extinctions, and fundamentalist religious crazies taking over whole countries, who the heck cares if a couple of chicks or a couple of dudes want to marry each other in the increasingly irrelevant USA?

Screw it, I'm going back to bed.

Yesterday, jbmcdragon and I drove to Sacramento to Candirats Rattery (warning, she has a really annoying website), so I could adopt three baby rats! I'd considered adopting from rescue again, but I really wanted to have babies, healthy babies. In fact, I decided, since I love curly coated, dumbo eared rats so much, I'd like to adopt curly coat dumbo baby rats. That meant finding a rattery. I found several, and of them a few had litters planned that were just what I was looking for. Candirats, in Sacramento, seemed awfully far away, but since I wasn't able to get on a litter waiting list anywhere else, I told her I'd like to be on the list for some babies that might be ready to adopt in June—the soonest she had available.

Well, come this Monday, I got an email: A couple of the people she thought she had lined up for an earlier litter had backed out—was I interested in the current litter? She sent a link to some pictures of the available litter for me to choose from. I picked M1, M4 and M7 from the photos, we agreed to meet Friday, I cajoled JB into driving up with me, and off we went.

( First off, it takes closer to three hours or more to drive to Sacramento from my house, not 2:12, Mapquest. )

Writing!
Baby rats coming on Friday!
Cold thing is being vanquished by sleep and antibiotics (proving it's not a cold, which is viral, but a resurgence of the perpetual sinus infection.)
Music!
Reading!
Strawberries!

And assorted miscellany ^_^

This really feels a lot like the start of another respiratory infection...

I'll start the antibiotics immediately. No more "oh it's just a virus" for me. With me, with the CVID, it's NEVER just a virus.

So, I had this... Calling, I guess. I was driving home from a day in the City, and I started thinking about Psalm 23, one that has never really meant much to me at all. And I felt this urge to rewrite it. A powerful urge. So when I got home, I did.

Rewriting the psalms: it's something countless people have done, making the language inclusive or modern, or retranslating from the original Hebrew. I'm sure this has been done before, and done better, but I'm going to do it anyway. Psalm Twenty-three ("The Lord is my shepherd") is one of those beloved old chestnuts that everyone knows by cultural osmosis, but it's never meant all that much to me. Why is it so important? I'm going to see if by rewriting it, I can find its meaning.

Psalm Twenty-three, Redux

I am in God's keeping, all my needs will be met.

She provides me with abundance and tranquility
to restore my soul.

She gives me opportunity to do good:
through me God acts upon the earth.

Even in deepest despair, I am not alone,
for the Divine Presence is with me,
protecting me.
With God's help, I vanquish my fears.
God's awesome strength is my strength.

When the world opposes me,
even then God is with me.
I pass through the refiner's fire,
and find blessings in my struggle.

All around me are the gifts of the Divine.
From the moment I first kindled into being,
to the moment I rejoin the Wholeness,
I am carried in God's loving embrace.

Indeed I have never been apart from God,
and will never be apart,
for I am an aspect of Holiness
at all times
and forever beyond the bounds of time.

Wow. It's kind of amazing how much more powerful this text is for me now. I feel loved and whole, and that I really am beloved by God. The act of writing that was a prayer, I suppose. I opened my soul and the Divine moved through me. I feel a transcendent connection to God the Source.

Wow.

( Here is the more familiar version of the psalm. )

Ever wake up with a song in your heart? How's this for a song? Today I woke up with the third movement, the Presto agitato, from Beethoven's Piano Sonata Number 14 in C-sharp minor (the Moonlight Sonata) in my heart. It's an excited, hurry up movement, full of urgency. It sounds like leaves being carried over a waterfall.

Beethoven is fabulous, passionate music, and pretty much all of it gets my pulse beating just a little faster, but this movement in particular... why this? It's the first movement, the Adagio, that everyone knows. The one you would recognize as the Moonlight Sonata, with its somber, oozing progression of heartbreak, every note hanging by a thread. I adore that movement. Adore it. It feels like a little piece of my soul being made audible.

So why today the frenetic Presto agitato? Am I in a hurry? Not particularly. Am I, as the name of the movement suggests, agitated? Perhaps a little, but no more than usual. I can feel my electrons buzzing, feel myself made of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen, a collective of atoms. But if I listen deep down I can always feel that. Or imagine I feel it. Is there a difference?

I was thinking about God, and belief, and how I hold two minds. I believe because deep down in my bones I know there is something Divine about creation, And I believe because I choose to believe. There's a part of me that stands back, skeptical, and eyes the atheist's path. It whispers that I am shoehorning in superstition where science would do. I hear it, I acknowledge it, and then I remind it about dark matter, and how little we really understand the physics of the universe, or the beauty of evolution, or the majesty of geology, or any of it.

I can hold both thoughts at once, as if I were two people with two brains, two antithetical ways of thinking, and that itself is part of the Mystery.

Our ancestors felt earthquakes and blamed angry gods, giant carp, slumbering dragons. Now we blame plate tectonics, thrust faults, the convection of Earth's liquid mantle driven by the heat of creation still residing in its iron core. Is that any less fantastic? Having a scientific understanding hardly takes the Divine out of the picture, it merely changes the face of God.

Ultimately, I am more than the sum of my atoms, even if I can imagine myself as matter and nothing more. I am energy as well, energy science doesn't wholly explain. More than physics and chemistry and biology, I encompass the science of my being and expand around it. A cake is more than flour and sugar and eggs. Water is more than hydrogen and oxygen. Today I claim my chakras, my ethereal and spiritual bodies, the soul that manifests in my physical body. Today I listen to the Sonata Number 14 in C-sharp minor, all three movements, and hear myself mirrored in each of them.

This meme brought to you by nezumiko and kilerkki, who challenged each other to answer the question in their LJ's: What is the best time of day? We did it because we were both complaining of LJ ennui, and thought maybe a challenge to write on a chosen topic would get us going. Pick it up and try! What is the best time of day for you?

Is there a best time of day? Is it a section of day, like morning or lunchtime or evening? Is it an hour, a minute? Is it the same from day to day? If someone says to you, when is the best time in the day, do you have an instinctive answer at the ready?

I have a handful. A Swiss Army knife of answers, where I can pull out the one that best suits my need at the moment (though none I suppose are as sharp and useful as a single purpose answer would be.)

( Actually let's start with the least best time of day. )