disease!

[helenic]

Just about recovered enough that the computer light doesn't hurt, but my nose is sore and peeling from being blown too much and I'm still getting through a box of tissues a day. I thought it was flu at first, feverish and panicky on Wednesday night with aching joints and a throbbing head, burrowing it under the pillows and crying every half hour for no reason; but it died off quickly enough that I suspect it was no more than a heavy cold. I'm not good at being ill, especially not with a temperature when my mental and emotional equilibrium has completely collapsed. I didn't sleep that night. It seemed endless but all I can remember now is a mass of what was probably more my own misery than actual suffering, self-indulgent to the last; saying aloud at 3am I feel exactly like a gelatinous blobby mess, with razorblades in and waking Iain, who insisted on staying with me because he passed it on in the first place (every girl deserves a boy who tells her she's beautiful even though her nose is swollen). I don't know how people manage to just ignore illness and keep going. Mostly I'm at the mercy of my moods, and viruses are no exception. I can put a reasonable damper on melancholy these days but I can't stop my bitch of a temper no matter how much I try, although it's worth it, I think, for the irrational happiness that overwhelms me whenever the light is right.

He persuaded me to go to the gym with him yesterday, adamant that exercise would make me feel better, and annoyingly he was right. There's something about the gym that both terrifies and fascinates me. It's in the weights machines, I think; those giant white contraptions like dentist's chairs lying in wait for someone to grab with their pincer-like arms. I let the boys wrestle with them and make do with the exercise bikes, watching my cheeks grow pinker in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors, put there deliberately (I'm sure of it) to taunt you into being thinner. But there's something wonderfully calming about it all, in the precision of the movements, the quickening thud-thud of the running machine that seems to give everyone else a beat to follow, pounding metal heatbeats combining to form a single complex rhythm, like clockwork. I like being breathless afterwards, and the tightness in my thighs. I'm going again this afternoon.

In the meantime five precious working days have vanished into nothing; I only missed one lecture but I didn't do my philosophy essay or my Ovid practical criticism, and will somehow have to squeeze them in alongside the fifty hours of work I have lined up this week (assuming I can do an essay in ten, which isn't likely). So much for recuperation. My domain is up and running again but I'm forbidding myself to touch it until I've done the five hours of Virgil that are due in on Monday, at the very least. My Greek prose can wait until tomorrow if it has to. Carrots and sticks. At the moment my actual degree is too distant to mean anything; it's the small targets that keep me going.