mahiwaga

So I like to blame all this on damned cats. Now I’ve got nothing against cats, per se. I kind of like how they’re not literal ass-kissers like dogs are (and I am a dog person.) But the problem is that I’m deathly allergic to them, and on Thursday night I got a double dose.

The most distressing part was probably the chest tightness. When I was a kid, I used to have terrible asthma, and for the most part that has gone away, except I get some exercise-induced wheezing, and whenever I get sick, I’m coughing for a month after I get better. And then there are cats.

I begin to worry when I start coughing. I never get truly wheezy except if I exercise. The only evidence of bronchospasm is this nagging cough that isn’t just post-nasal drip.

And then I rub my eyes.

Thankfully, I have an albuterol inhaler. But the horse was out of the gate when it came to the itchy eyes and dripping nose, and the night was pretty much shot and I still had to review a couple of articles in order to give a quick talk on Friday. This meant very little restful sleep, and I went to work under a fog.

I did have a bizarre moment of dejá vù at work, about this really interesting rheumatological case. When I thought about it, though, I realize that the first time I heard about something similar was in a strange dream I had in 3rd year or maybe 4th year of med school. Things like that make me wonder if sometimes spacetime does leak, and that there are ways to get a glimpse of the future.

I luckily get out by 4:30 p.m., and end up seriously crashing out at 7 p.m. That was basically my Friday.

But, of course, for no good reason, I wake up at 1 a.m., and I can’t go back to sleep.

OK, so maybe there is a reason. There are a million thoughts fly through my head.

I feel like my brain is on fire.

But there’s no point in contemplating these things. Who knows how anything is supposed to turn out? I keep having these moments of portentousness, when I think something big is going to happen to me, but I’m cynical and jaded enough to realize that this is just wishful thinking, or maybe hypomania.

Now, sitting in front of this computer, I feel trapped. Like I’m living my own Groundhog Day, whirling around in circles, doing the same thing over and over again. And this here is definitely the depression talking, because at times like this, I feel like nothing is ever going to change for me, or if things do, it’ll always be for the worse.

Whatever happened to enjoying life’s simple pleasures?

There are three musicals that I used to know all the lyrics to: “Beauty and the Beast”, “Once On This Island”, and “Rent” Each one encompassed a particular period of my life, and “Rent” reminds me of my junior and senior year in college, especially because my roommate at the time was quite obsessed with it. Being in college, the Bohemian lifestyle, the conflict between making money and making art—these things all resonated.

Jonathan Larson adapted Puccini’s “La Vie Bohème”, changing the setting from Paris in the 1800s to NYC in the 1990s, and the plague besetting the characters is AIDS instead of TB. As I learn more about HIV, parts of the musical waft through my brain, and sure, it’s a consumer-friendly version, sanitized and airbrushed, nowhere near as messy as the real thing, but what is amazing is the advances in treatment that have occurred in the past 10 years.

The sad thing is that it is not necessarily the virus itself that baffles us. Sure, we don’t have a cure, but at least we now have ways of controlling it. The problem is that you need to have thousands and thousands of dollars to afford the drugs. And so atrocities occur in this country, to say nothing about what happens in developing countries, particularly in Africa.

HIV (like many health care issues) is intimately tied with the inequity of resource distribution inherent in our peculiar economic institutions, and it seems that talking about inevitably leads to talking about dreaming of the coming revolution.

I’m not sure if this might have been when my infatuation with NYC may have started. “Rent” came out in 1996, and I remember those sticky August nights in Manhattan in 1997, doing the tourist things, being obsessed with complex tangle of subway lines, watching “Les Misérable” on Broadway, dreaming of things turning out for the better.

My oldest friend, and then my good friend from college, and now my sister have all moved out the NYC, the wounded autumnal city. There is something apocalyptically prescient about the line that discusses “living in America at the end of the millenium” and while there were worries about Y2K, the Fall of the Republic will likely be remembered in the history books as beginning with November 7, 2000.

Man, Rosario Dawson is hot, but anyway.

Wow, that was quite convoluted and rambling.