Melancholia

My computer is a less than satisfactory tool right now. The battery is completely dead, so it runs only when plugged in - and with just a little tug,,, beeeeeeooop. Laptop down. Highly annoying. I have been wanting to buy a netbook as my primary writing tool for some time now (like a year or more), but I can't justify the purchase right now when we're about to move. Damn these less than well-paying jobs D and I have!

The past two days have been peculiar. I came home from work on Wednesday with a painful and incredibly itchy welt on the inside of my left knee. Benadryl didn't do anything but knock me out, so we went to the ER around midnight. Docs gave me a diagnosis of cellulitis, but preferred to give me a lon antibiotic regime just in case it's Lyme disease or something else unexplained. It was very painful to walk so I stayed home the past two days. Today things are looking up, swelling going down and redness finally retreating, but I still have a million other itchy bug bites to deal with so I guess I don't begrudge myself some time to recover.

(Though taking time off work is certainly not helping my financial woes.)

My sleep schedule has been all out of whack since the Benadryl/ER. That always leaves me with an odd feeling of unreality. I've also been a reading a book (which is very good) in which one of the main characters seems to be suffering some kind of mental breakdown - and all of the other POV characters have various levels of paranoia and flashbacks to abuse. Spending so much time reading that story has probably not helped my feeling of unreality.

I don't know why, but I definitely slip more into the minds of characters who have some degree of crazy going on. I find it compelling to read, and even more compelling to write. I suppose it might be because all of my darkest moments have consisted of me "losing it" in some way - feeling a slip on the grip of what's real, wondering if I can control my thoughts or actions, watching the world spin around me without me.

Today I'm having that feeling in a disconnected sort of way. Trying to gauge what my reactions to words and experience should be rather than just having them. Spending too much time in meandering thought. It's nothing that I can pin on a particular incident. I don't feel like there's anything I can do to make it stop. I just have to drift through with it until normal feeling floods back in.

Jeez, human brains are weird.

P.S. The book is called All For One by Ryne Douglas Pearson. I'm about 3/4ths of the way done with it, and it's a pretty fantastic little thriller. http://www.amazon.com/All-For-One-ebook/dp/B0044KM16I