a variety of headaches

The main headache on my mind today was the most literal of all of them -- I awoke with a pounding headache, the likes of which I haven't experienced since before I left work last winter, the kind that makes me want to curl up under the pillow and stay there all day...and even the memory is giving me a headache now. I don't get migraines, but I do get bad headaches, and if there weren't a couple of meetings that I felt compelled to go to because of my role as sober, responsible manager, I would have called in sick.

Instead, I went to work, where, as anticipated, the same meetings that I felt compelled to go to were each headaches in their own right. I love the people that I work with, but when I have a bad headache, my patience is v. thin, and my tongue sharpens in direct correlation to the thinning of my tolerance. As anyone whom I have loved knows, I am not always the nicest person in the room; I believe that usually I make up for it with moments of generosity and a series of jhokes, but that may not actually be true. Or rather, maybe the jhokes don't make up for the occasional moments when I say the bluntest, sharpest, most sarcastic things in a conscious or unconscious effort to draw blood. I've grown up some, and am generally better able to rein myself in than I used to be, but I will likely always have my moments.

So today I mostly held myself in, but I left early to nurse my head. I almost fell asleep on the drive back to the city, which was scary; I don't know why I was sleepy, since I slept almost nine hours last night, but getting back up here was difficult. Then, when I got home, I knew I shouldn't take a nap because it would throw off tonight's slumber. So, I picked up 'Twilight', the book I started reading last night.

I promptly finished it...then picked up the second in the series, 'New Moon', and read it through in one go. I didn't even stop for dinner, which likely didn't help the headache; while it's not as bad as it was this morning, six hours of reading without food or drink probably wasn't smart. I just had a bowl of cereal, which will tide me over until morning, but I'll have to be smarter tomorrow.

The last metaphorical headache is that the writing in these books is so great -- the descriptions are just so lush and perfect that it makes me despair of and for my own writing. I've been avoiding reading historical romances because I get all paranoid and start making unfair comparisons in my mind; but apparently reading anything good acts as an agent of fear rather than inspiration. I need to get over this -- two nights ago, I was thrilled with what I have, and just because my style is different than this author's does not make it worse. I will continue to remind myself of that, but right now I think I'll go to bed, and hope that tomorrow isn't nearly as much of a strain on my nerves.