Various notes on the body - Monday afternoon

This morning I woke up with a crick in my neck. To be more exact, it’s a soreness. The kind of soreness that makes you think you have meningitis, even though you know you got a vaccine for that before you went to college. The kind of soreness that absolutely prohibits your body from supporting the weight of your head. I strain to move the great, massive, all-powering weight of my head to a place where my spine is straight, where I sit like a dancer instead of an office assistant. This is a great strain.

Yesterday, I went to my brother’s little league baseball game, and the wind was so strong that the game had to pause while dust clouds blew through each inning. When I went to bed last night, I realized I still had brown grit underneath my fingernails. I rinsed my face after the game to remove invisible sheens of dirt, and wished for one of those crocodile nail-brushes made famous in kindergarten classrooms.

Saturday, I spent the hours of 4am to 6am throwing up in my dear friends’ bathroom. My stomach is a strange thing. Though I had spent a good portion of Friday evening drinking beer, such a violent reaction is unusual for the free-wheeling pace of my drinking that night. I blame this bout of illness on some strange turkey given to me by my roommate for my lunch on Friday. Vomiting makes my brain feel as though it is useless, falling a distant second to the whims of my body and its chemistry.

Also, I’ve come to the conclusion that I may not be able to afford myself. A new insurance plan has driven the cost of a monthly medication from $30 to $50, and I’m currently itching my way through my last pair of contact lenses. In a recent visit to the dentist (my first in over a year), I was informed that my wisdom teeth are impacted and have to go. While my insurance covers the cleaning I had, the waiting period on major procedures like that is about 4 months longer than I’m going to be at my current job. Maybe my wisdom teeth are to blame for this exponential growth in my head’s weight. But for now, they stay, due to insufficient funds.

It’s been nearly a month since the Neko Case concert, and I still can’t stop listening to her. I think I’ve been bewitched. My body reacts physically to the song “I wish I was the moon.” When she says that so and so will recognize her because “I’ll be the one with my heart in my lap,” I know exactly what she’s talking about. Exactly.

It is nice enough outside today that I’m tempted to quit my job and try to get the band back together.