I’m getting into the “mom, I’m bored” stage. Eyes hurt trying to read graphic novels & poetry magazines, especially poetry magazines, and I’m too bored to sleep, although that is probably what I should be doing. I’m generally not so skilled at sleeping even in my non-sick life.
Maybe I should watch something on a screen but I’m too sick to navigate the complexities of Gary’s DVD collection.
Maybe I should… look at pictures?
I certainly can’t do anything constructive. My fever is dancing around 101/102. Shivery. Boring boring boring.
What do you do when you’re sick?
Otohime 
When I’m sick I complain a lot. And I drink very large amounts of water. And read science-fiction. And complain more.But I don’t recommend the complaining thing–it’s a character flaw.
Take a bath? Either cold or hot as the fever demands at the moment.
What Stan said. Apparently I make whine-y noises when I'm sick; lots of little heeerms and ooooofs and ooooow to register discomfort. So I've been told. Sub-vocalizing one's distress is not, however, an activity or distraction.My mom had this excellent sick box when I was little. Of activities. It had one of those pens with like 50 different colors of ink and you push down on each particular ink's… lever? Or something? These pens were very big because each one contained so many ink distribution channels. So but anyways, I recommend movies. When I'm too sick to leave the house and pick up movies, and my netflix selection is tapped, I watch the same 4 or 5 movies over and over again, pretty much the only ones I had in the house, which David Horton sent me in the mail from China like ten years ago. I don't totally understand the logic of the movies he sent me, they are mostly u.s. bootlegs? So whenever I'm sick I watch:beijing bicyclejules & jimthe postman always rings twicethe thin manbutterfield 8five easy piecesIt's a good set. Last January I watched the entire thing in rotation twice in a row.p.s. I love your yellow shirt in the fish exchange costume. also how weird that the long cardigan / long blazer is coming back? feel better!xo!
Well, here's what I ended up doing last night.I have a kind of sickness strategy of denying myself analgesics & fever reducers during the day and just suffering because I her that's what the body is “supposed” to do. I caved early today and took some advil about an hour ago which is why I can sit up to type this.So last night I took the advil much later, essentially because Gary said I should, and watched a netflix movie, a 1950s Egyptian movie with some stunning dance scenes featuring the gorgeous Samia Gamal. That was fun, even though the moral at the end was that “a woman's place is with her family,” as opposed to national superstardom as a glamorous dancer. Samia Gamal had the Most Incredible waistline; I recommend YouTubing her; there's something reminiscent of Bettie Page there.Today, even more miserable, I mainly just stayed in bed suffering. But I kept thinking about docu-poetry, about Juliana's piece that Ron linked to this morning, and about parts of your performance, Stephanie, and C.S. Perez' reading I saw on Hallowe'en, and about, well, how there's something about this phenomenon that I want to investigate and that, in a way, it troubles me, so I wrote pages and pages in my notebook, as a “poem,” of my thoughts on it, and when I get more energy I will try to type it up if after I recover from this fever I find that it is not too judgmental or proscriptive or divisive. I really don't mean it to be. It's just that I feel you are all doing something extremely different from me and I want to look at the differences and the extent to which the motivations are the same or different. It's a weird sickbed activity, isn't it?Yes. The yellow blouse. It was a beautiful and maybe unreproducible shade of canary, a vintage thing with vertical lines of lace going down the front. It was too big for me, but that didn't matter in the 80s. I wore it on an early date with Masaya under the plum blossoms in Umegaoka. I remembered that it did something quite wonderful for my skin tone. Thanks for noticing. I will never. ever. wear aa long cardigan like that again, though.I hope you are feeling better, too, Stephanie…