Tuesday, May 05, 2009

out where the dreams all hide

This is a four-minute post. I stayed home from work today; the smashing headache that I had yesterday continued unabated today, and I decided that battling traffic and sitting in meetings would only exacerbate the desire to scrape my brains out of my skull just to relieve the pressure. Obviously, the pain made me rather less than productive; I did stay caught up on emails, but there are many things on my to-do list this week, and I haven't accomplished any of them thus far. I watched an episode of Craig, but it says a lot that he didn't hold my interest, and so I turned to my laptop for solace. But, staring at a screen for sixteen hours a day is likely contributing to my headache, so I put that away as well.

That left with me nothing to do. I thumbed through all of the Crate and Barrel, CB2, Pier One, West Elm, and eBags (one of those things doesn't belong there) catalogues that have piled up, but nothing caught my fancy. Finally, I decided that the only thing that could cure my headache was reading a book -- under the assumption that my headache was stress-induced, and that reading would take my mind off of whatever is stressing me.

My head still hurts, but I did read THE FIRE ROSE by Mercedes Lackey. I have a weakness for retellings of the Beauty and the Beast story, and I read this one way back in high school; now, while my close attention to writing mechanics made me enjoy it less because the writing itself is not particularly good, I was able to better appreciate the setting. It takes place in San Francisco and Pacifica in the months leading up to the 1906 earthquake, and so I recognized many of the places that she described in a way that I was completely unaware of in high school. In fact, I read it before I really knew much of anything about Stanford, and so I caught references to Leland Stanford that I would have missed before (the 'beast' in this book is a rail baron). So, while it didn't cure me, it was probably good for me to spend a few hours absolutely disengaged from everything related to both my job and my writing.

Four minutes were up about two minutes ago; it's time for bed. I'm going to work tomorrow despite my headache, and so I'll just have to hope that it clears up on its own...

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