"She decides, with misgivings, that she is finished for today. Always, there are these doubts. Should she try another hour? Is she being judicious, or slothful? Judicious, she tells herself, and almost believes it. She has her two hundred and fifty words, more or less. Let it be enough. Have faith that you will be here, recognizable to yourself, again tomorrow."
– Michael Cunningham (in the voice of Virginia Woolf), The Hours
An odd week. Quiet, and some work done, not the important work though.
Did you know that, if you take thyroid medicine – for hypothyroidism, not hyper- – that if you find yourself sleeping too much, for instance twelve or fourteen hours a day, and you simply double your dosage, that you start waking up again? But then you become anxious rather than depressed (with shaking hands, even). It's a bit like caffeine, I suppose.
I've been seeing Nanette in the hospital almost every day – which is not nearly as virtuous as it sounds: she has plenty of visitors and is doing perfectly well, she's just a little bored at this point. I must admit to a secret selfishness, one that will be obvious to anyone who knows me: in the guise of taking care of a friend, I am really just avoiding work....
Well, there are worse things.
While going to the hospital to see her, I've been entangled in trying to find the right – the good; the best? – entrance to the hospital, the one that's not too far from her and yet accessible. I think all her visitors would agree, there really isn't one. But while looking I've been taking the bus a stop further than usual, and landing in front of Marks & Spencer's, or Marks & Sparks as it's known in this part of the world. The part where... where they sell the food.
Now, Marks & Sparks is known for fairly ritzy (posh) food; lots of it already prepared or semi-prepared. I don't usually buy so much prepared food, but it's right there, and some of it's very nice, and it's not unhealthy... Of course it is also expensive and rather unnecessary (slothful, in the Calvinist view). But twice now I've bought various things, brought them home and heated and combined them.
And, perhaps less justifiably (because most certainly not healthy): the sweets. Perhaps most acutely, the Battenberg cakes. Mmmm... two-color, covered in marzipan. I didn't like marzipan when I was younger – in fact, none of us did except my father (and when we received some large, elaborate box of marzipan candies at Christmas, we would unanimously hand it over to him without regrets). But somehow, now....
But time keeps going, we're ever closer to teaching classes (just ten days now); and I'm older every day, and the book is not written, and Gerhard's message asking about the anthology is still unanswered.
On the other hand... I've seen Silverlake Living, and The Hours, and am now reading the latter to boot. I thought (ridiculously) that I was taking a break by watching the German television series of Doktor Faustus; not much of a break I suppose (also depressing, and now that I think of it also about venereal topics). And so thinking about depression, and AIDS, and giving up, but from outside as it were: with a clinical interest in understanding as much as I can.
And a dream today, at midday on the couch: that while traveling somehow through a place which turned into Zürich – where, in the waking world, I will go to study Jungian analysis in just about a month – a handsome, gentle man found me a beautiful cottage where I could stay during my visit. Tiny, all vertical, all wood: but cozy and supportive and kindly, as much as architecture can be, anyway.
(There are so many threads that can be pulled out from all this – you don't know that my father had hypothyroidism, too, which caused him to go to sleep for a year when I was fourteen; or that my mother once, quite unfairly, accused him of being the reason I am gay, because his fatherly influence was absent in that crucial year, though I was already quite gay by then; or that surgery and symbolism around thyroids and throats is also floating around, related to at least two friends; or that my first novel by Woolf wasn't Mrs. Dalloway, but instead The Voyage Out, which I consider one of the great experiences of my life, from those first arresting paragraphs, where I was practically holding my breath at not only the complexity but the importance of all these words, as though I would understand so much if I could only get it all... and the details of the dream, which would merely madden you because they are details, but which are precious to me... and I didn't even tell you what a Battenberg cake is like, not in sufficient detail anyway.)
And so: the hours go on....
I don't like M&S food hall - too processed; you have plenty good cooking skills, get out of there!
I used to wonder about endocrinology. Well to be specific when younger and looking too young (to fit in) about if mine was ok. Which of course it was. Is yours? Are you self diagnosing? That can be obsessive you know.
Fourteen - yeh, I think I got f**ked up then. No, maybe it's just it's a time when one's conditioning shows so much.
What do you WANT to do?
Posted by: Dave Robinson | January 24, 2009 at 06:22 PM