Friday, August 25th, 2023

Over it.

I’ve been 46 for exactly two months today! It’s been, well, who cares how it’s been. It’s been okay. Anyway, I’m over COVID, over Paxlovid (makes mouth taste like you’re eating garbage, may save your life, see how my viral load started lightening when I started it on day 3), and I hope to be, one glorious day, over COVID rebound (aka “Paxlovid rebound”). Covid symptoms, other than a very fast and hard-working heart, mostly gone now, cursed autoimmune disease symptoms mostly back now, test still somewhat positive. Argh.

“Never was there a tale of more woe/than this of negative tests, then back to zero”.

So, I had this idea that throughout August, when both teenagers (one of whom is actually no longer a teenager but an adult) were off camp-counselling all day and when I would be continuing a longstanding & anxiety-provoking state of under-employment or at least under-renumeration, I would have, if not loads of cash, loads of time. Nothing more valuable. August, from the point of view of an emotionally and physically challenging spring and busy start of summer, was like an oasis in the desert: a vision of cool, intense, thirst-quenching immersion in my fictional world that I have longed and longed for. Focus, focus, focus, and feeling the characters and their world from the inside. But you’ve already gathered how August has turned out.

Not just illness, but also work, which is very welcome obviously, because even people who currently weigh one feather¹ still need to eat, but which I find inevitably becomes the priority in an Eisenhower matrix way (see diagram below), where the