sicknesses

I shouldn't be here in Chicago; I should be in New York. But I have an eye infection, which for some reason feels like a bigger deal than it is. When I went to the eye doctor yesterday morning I missed my flight so I could figure out what was wrong. They poked my eye a lot and then I started to cry, and the doctors argued over cellulitis or allergy. Then they gave me a prescription for antibiotics and I left and started to sob. I fumbled with insurance information at the pharmacy counter for maybe twenty minutes, all the while dabbing at myself with squares from a roll of toilet paper I'd taken along in my bag. After I got my antibiotics, I walked back across the hall to the doctor to see if they'd prescribe pain medication; they wouldn't. So I walked home haphazardly, as it was sunny and my eyes were dialated and puffy.

It was really just intensely pathetic.

I feel better now, medically speaking. I'm 4/28 tablets through my antibiotics and I imagine the infection as strange white spots on the inside of my eyelid, slowly shrinking. I'm keeping my eye closed, so it doesn't really hurt much now. I'm sleeping a lot, but I keep having nightmares, which I almost never have. Also dreams that feel like nightmares but for reasons I can't identify.

I watched a lot of TV today via the internet. Episodes of Friends, and Monty Python's Flying Circus, and Scrubs, and then A. and I finished The Godfather. I practiced Hindi for a little while.. I like writing certain things. Like "Indian" (hindustani). I'm almost through the first chapter of "Teach Yourself Hindi", and it's a relief compared to Mandarin. It's so logical.

Ach, I wish there were a few more people around. And I was a little more functional. Being even a little sick, in a way that requires one to take care of oneself, feels unnervingly reminiscent of being old or being a little dead. It's too much sleeping and being inside and not being hungry.

[Admittedly depressing segue:]

I get really terrified sometimes, about the future. Not my future ("what will I be?") but the future in general. I've written about it in posts before but I usually delete them within a 24-hour period because I feel they're too depressing and don't make fit well with my normally-upbeat-or-at-least-containably-sensitive writing. Fear about the future is a bigger ballgame. More serious and expansive. Overwhelming, really, as a worry. It's about a lack of context. I had a dream a few months ago, in which I was in a perfectly normal and banal situation and suddenly the law of gravity began to disappear. Everyone started to lift from the ground and drift away. If you just picture it, it seems more interesting, but if you actually try to feel yourself into that position, imagine the feeling of context entirely disappearing--that's the horror of it. The depth of the fear, I guess. It's really hard to see it if you don't believe for at least a second or two that it's happening.

It happens to me every so often, maybe an hour or so a week if I'm really concentrating on things bigger than my life. Not nearly that often when I'm focusing on me, food, happiness, sunsets, history, paychecks, my future. I feel like it's something universal though, or at least now universal for my generation. Something not just about being 19, but about being 19 right now, at this time, in this world. With all of these things bearing down and cynicism and selfishness being prominent cultural institutions.

It's freaky.

Not to depress anyone reading this... I just had to express that, as the feeling struck. I hope it's an extreme, as I usually manage to convince myself. It's such a broad, modern topic.. but hope isn't terribly far away. Sometimes it's comforting to know the human race is "in it together." You hug someone and you're melding, you're made from the same stuff. As much as people feel isolated and lonely, maybe we do understand each other. Maybe we just can't communicate it.

One apartment over, my neighbors are singing "American Pie" and laughing. I don't really know them, but they're profoundly comforting.

Yeeah, I probably wouldn't have been much fun in New York this weekend anyway.