is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Fine in a week.
I�m hormonally abnormal. It doesn�t really matter much. And it has even made Heidi declare that I am more evolved than most. I only menstruate four to six times a year. And before you get all sad that you have to skip today�s entry because it�s about ladyparts, let me assure you that this is just the background to another story, and you will get no harrowing accounts of bloodletting here. This background story involves how, though often things will go as they do for me, meaning that every two to three months I�ll undergo what other women have to undergo much more often, every now and then that�s not what happens and so I have to do something about it. Every doctor I�ve ever seen, specialist or no, has given me the same advice, which is to take seven to ten days of high dosage progesterone to get things going. It always works. But it makes me CRAZY. And desperately unhappy. Not unhappy in an intellectual way, like I�m bummed I have to take synthetic hormones or I�m stuck on the couch unable to figure out what to write. Unhappy in a totally way-past-rational depths-of-despair kind of way. It�s hormone poisoning. I�m in the midst of that right now. It sucks. Of course, when I am in the depths of despair and everything is either beyond-sad or positively enraging, and I look terrible no matter what I do or do not do about my appearance, I know that none of that is true if truth is the product of rationality. But, well, I have news for you. 1) truth is not only about rationality. And 2) even if it were, it wouldn�t matter much to someone whose despair-depths are way past help of being aided by reason. This is just something I have to waddle my way through, miserably, for a week or two.
And that made think of David Foster Wallace. Being in the midst of hormone poisoning makes me understand not so much how someone could be miserable enough to commit suicide, but it at least helps me comprehend on some level how someone whose life looks fortune-filled might nonetheless be unmanageably miserable in ways that seem to be beyond both self-control and the help of others. This is no attempt to explain anything or offer reasons that I couldn�t possibly have. It�s just an admission that there are many kinds of misery, and some of them are more miserable than others, no matter how things look from the outside. If I felt all the time like I do this week, instead of feeling this way for a couple of weeks every year or so, I would be a fundamentally different person. I would not be very much fun to be around, either. (And I think this is how I felt throughout much of my 20s. But it is not possible now for me to say that with any certainty.) I�ll be fine in a week. But I'll still be sad about David Foster Wallace.
But anyway, that is why it is also �funny� that I�m right now involved in a most retarded and unjust misunderstanding with a colleague of mine. I�ll spare you the details except to say that it is the type of absurd story that would make a good episode of The Office if The Office took place in academia. What�s funny, in a way linked to the story I just told you about my state of mind this week, is that in a recent email that totally enraged me, one of the non-enraging things he wrote was that it was too bad we weren�t having this conversation in person. And on most weeks that would be true. Email is not a good medium for negotiations of this sort. But this week, knowing what I know about myself and my fuse at this point in time, it is pretty fucking fortunate that we are not having this conversation in person. But there's also something tragicabsurdly like a Foster-Wallace story in the larger story that I'm not telling you about the misunderstanding. What�s sad is that the stakes are so frightfully low that I�m not sure what makes me more depressed, that my colleague thinks what he does of me, or that he thinks it would matter in this setting.
People are difficult to figure out sometimes. I�m sure things will calm down. Maybe he has worked with lots of terrible people. He�ll find out soon enough that I�m not one of them. Fine in a week. One hopes.
12:34 a.m. - September 18, 2008
Lily - 2008-09-18 15:13:58
You hang in there, baby!
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