murphy strikes again

when i started this blog, i said straight up that it'd be irregular, but then i somehow got pretty good at posting at least every other day. however, now that it's freelancers' busy season i find i can't keep up with the standard i set for myself, and even reminding myself that i never promised my few readers frequency doesn't make me feel better. it's not like i don't want to be here, time is just shrinking @ an alarming rate. i need a tesseract to get my shit under control.

so of course, just as i thought i'd almost made it through my shitty week safely, i got sick.
we had an outdoor shakespeare gig on saturday, and i was planning on posting when i got home that evening, about this funny dream i had about unexpectedly finding my (male) friend stripping (more later) and my jalapeno-contact-lens-incident (also later). and figured i'd also write some more monday night, since i had an audition and a teaching gig, after the radio station- surely there'd be stories after a day like that...
by the time i got home from saturday's outdoor shakespeare i felt a little less than lovely. but i put it down to allergies and took a claritin. i didn't end up posting that night because the claritin and presumed allergies were making molasses in my brain, and i absolutely had to work on my monologue for monday's audition, and could tell it was going to be slow. so i skipped posting to prance around my living room in what i can only assume was a very ponce-y fashion, while talking loudly to myself about brushing my hair, which my neighbours no doubt found bizarre, with the dreadlocks and all...
i felt pretty crappy the rest of saturday night and decided to take sunday as recovery+monologue day because i wanted to be prepared for monday, but all of sunday i still felt bad in spite of keeping the windows closed against pollen on an otherwise gorgeous day, and could only try not to cry at the thought of how losing my voice would affect my monologue. so monday, on claritin, i hit the radio station and was very productive, auditioned, which went reasonably well, and i think i managed to hide the slight raspiness tickling the back of my throat, but as i headed over to teach (on the opposite side of the district) and the adrenalin deserted me, i realised i felt worse than over the weekend.
got off the metro and walked uphill (of course) to the school, lugging my backpack (3gig-day) and struggling to breathe through congestion and my asthma's response to it, barely made it through teaching, and by the time i got home (1 hour commute, just when i thought it was finally all over) i had almost no voice, but chills as some sort of evil compensation.
meanwhile, grims is sick enough that he got to work and had to turn around and come right back home, so yesterday, when we were actually home at the same time, we were both horribly sick with fevers, congestion, headaches and cramps. clearly, my allergy-assumption was an underestimation of the problem. lamer than lame. last night was miserable, and we slept on the couch the past 2 nights, so grims could half-sit-up in the recliner to help him breathe.
and i forgot to mention that as i was rushing from my audition to the school, i found out the hard way that the d.c. metro only allows you to buy a farecard with your debit/credit card twice per day. so i was standing there with an unusually (for me) fat bank account (freelancers' busy season pays off), but couldn't ride because i had no cash. i had to go beg the station manager to hook me up and he had to call ahead to my destination to explain what happened so they'd let me out. i must say that both the besthesda and benning road station managers on duty yesterday from 1.30-2.45p.m. were the best!
but on the way home, instead of metro-to-bus i had to bus-to-bus the whole way (a lot less comfortable when you sick). at least i had bus fare because i take the bus from union station to my house anyway. thank who-the-fuck-ever for my having bus fare. myself, i guess.
anyway, i feel somewhat better today in spite of sounding like shit dragged across a cheese-grater, and the rest of the week's mostly @ the radio station- no more shakespeare until sunday (dude's birthday is supposedly sometime this week, even though scholars can't actually agree on who the hell he was) so on to the more amusing shit.
the other day (lost track of time between being busy and sick) i dreamt that i went to this strip club we heard about recently. now we long suspected it was a strip club because very few buildings on dupont circle corners have so few windows. it always looks clean and well-kept, but has no sign, no windows, and no obvious clientele. a friend recently told us it's a chinese restaurant with brazilian strippers, so as one who enjoys a good strip club, i must go. especially since i think chinese is a much better meal than burgers+wings to accompany naked women (and yes, i'll tell once i see for myself).
so the other night i dreamt we went, and upon walking in saw my friend watkins onstage, stripping. he was wearing nothing but pasties, but for some reason, my subconscious (and if you know me, you'll understand how surprising this is) censored his naked self. there was a general blurring of him between the waist and knees. now i love watkins to death and i think he's cute, so i don't know exactly what this blurring of his nether regions was about, but as i've been asked by mutual friends, i will point out that waist-to-knees is indeed, a big blur.
but the other thing that amazed my waking self was that he had his pasties twirling simultaneously in opposite directions (speaking of which, did you know that birds have 2 voiceboxes that they have simultaneous independent control of? that shit's so cool!). now i haven't had a moment to call and ask him if he does in fact know how to simultaneously twirl pasties in opposite directions, but you best believe when i find out how, i'll post instructions alongside the directions to the chinese-restaurant-brazilian-strip-club.

sorry this is another blogella (credit to rosie for that lovely word) but before i go, i have a cautionary tale that alyincali (who'll be here soon! yay!) reminded me of.
when we were in university, before i found contact lenses that were comfortable, a friend who i've wisely forgotten told me that if a lens was gunky i could take it out and put it in my mouth for a second, or just lick it, then put it back in my eye. one's own saliva is apparently a good quick fix when there's no solution available. so i took this advice, and it seemed to help on those long days when my contacts felt like nickels, but the last time i tried it, i forgot that i'd recently eaten a sandwich liberally garnished with fresh jalapenos. needless to say, i haven't done that since (lens-licking, not jalapenos because i can't give up pepper).
i would try to explain what it's like to put a contact lens covered in capsaicin in your eye, but i think you get the point without a description of the unparalleled, seemingly-unquenchable agony. couldn't wear my contacts for days.
feel free to point and laugh.

walk good.