Musing: Disease, Rasputin, and Thom Yorke

I come from a family of optimistic hypochondriacs. We carry more varieties of cough drops in our pockets than we do coins. No, the Halls didn't work, but I sure hope the Ricola does! Sometimes, my family will chew on Tums as candy (it's tasty and helps the heartburn, which they always have). Unfortunately, I can't separate myself too much. When I was younger I always wanted to have hemophilia, that way I could be one step closer to being a Romanov. Hey, I loved fabriche eggs, ornate ball gowns and the Peterhoff Palace. I considered changing my name to Anya or adding a -schka to the end of my name, but, after much perusing of the characters in Russian classics, decided that I should just stick to the hemophilia instead. I already bruised like an overripe peach, and consecutive consonants weren't really my thing. You see, the littlest Romanov, Alexei, had hemophilia and was healed by Rasputin (Alexandra was a carrier of that toilsome disease). And then I realized that internal bleeding isn't cool, and Russian mystics with long beards gave my nine year old mind nightmares. So, I bought the Anastasia soundtrack instead...it quenched my thirst for Rusky heritage, but not my desire to have some kind of health problem, albeit nothing too serious, just things about which I could complain and could continue to do so for the remainder of my long life.

More recently, when I had mono, I was prescribed steroids. I had quite the rash, you see (think hot pink hives covering almost the entirety of my body), and they were supposed to make my skin heal up quicker...But, I didn't fear the potential weight gain. And I didn't fear the word itself, although I must admit steroids come with quite the stigma nowadays. Actually, I didn't fear anything about them...I looked forward to the possible and rare side effect being...mania! This was the point in my life when I was a depressed loon, and Thom Yorke was, at that point, really cool to me. He has mania, and is depressed (bi-polar, actually) and hey...he practically trips out at every one of his performances, his mind being his drug. And fuck, I wanted to be grandiose with excess creative energy. I figured it would be the only excuse I would ever have to write crazy avant-garde shit and actually get away with it. "Now, what inspired you to write this piece of poetry," Ann Curry would ask. "Well," I would say, clearing my throat, and sipping my coffee (black, of course), "it was during one of my manic stages." She would squint her eyes, intrigued. "And what was that like?" Dramatic pause, a casual glance to the ceiling, eyes returning to Ann, though purposely distant. "Well, it's hard for me to say." Always enigmatic, always the literary savant: the hypomanic artiste. Suffice it to say, the rash healed and I was just moody for a month. Oh, and I dyed my hair two shades darker. No grandiosity, just melodrama.

Right now I have three mosquito bites in an odd formation on my left thigh. I'm wondering if I'll contract some rare form of malaria, or if they're a skin manifestation of crop circles, and if I keep scratching eventually some neon green alien will emerge from my bites and kidnap me, and take me to Xrzytlkmn, his space ship. It would take more than an ocean of calamine lotion to get rid of that guy.

Now I'm going to bed. I don't have sleep apnea, but I do sleep talk and walk and throw. I used to think that it was bullshit when guys like Steven Steinberg would say that they couldn't be held responsible for stabbing their wife 26 times and killing her because they were "asleep." And I still do to a large extent, but I'm responsible for throwing objects at people in my sleep. Once this past year I threw my pants across the room at my roommate's face because I complained of the heat. I woke up sans pants and was immediately worried, only to find them splayed across my roommate's face. Then I was more worried. Sometimes I wonder if I didn't have those near me what I would have thrown instead. Eek!