Traveller's Tales

This life thing we all do sure has some weird side trips.  Keeps things interesting, but I’m not sure I’d recommend some of them.

The one I was just on, for instance — the ‘go to the doctor for chest pains and let him tell you that your blood pressure is so high your head is about to explode’ adventure really isn’t all it’s hyped up to be.  Sure, you get some time away from work, that’s nice in theory, but it’s hardly quality vacation time.  I mean, you can’t enjoy it because you’re constantly going to some doctor or other to get poked and prodded, to get your blood sucked and your chest x-rayed and your heart stress-tested and electronically scrutinized and to get a wide variety of drug cocktails introduced to your system (“Hello, system, we’re Hydrochlorothorazide and Irbesartan, and we’re about to spend a lot of time together.”), and all the while the tour guides don’t tell you whether this is the end of the ride or just another turn.  Really dodgy design for a ride if you ask me.

Anyway, in my case it wound up being just another turn and I’m back from the trip, rowing along with the current with everyone else again, but wow does shit like that change things.  Like what you eat, how much you drink, how often and how hard you exercise, how long you sleep, how hard you can work — you know, pretty much every aspect of the crap you do every day goes through a big ol’ WTF loop and comes out the other end looking like, well, the opposite of what it did going in.  Overall, I find myself enjoying the changes I’m having to make quite a bit — almost as though I needed some sort of excuse, which is dumb, but which would not be the first time I was accused of that fault.  But those old bad habits sure do lurk.

Still no idea how this will affect my working life over the long haul, but at least there’s still a working life for me to consider and no immediate plans for doom and/or gloom.  Certainly doesn’t affect the writing, but I’ll save the updates on that for next time.

Good to be back.  Now pass the tomato slices.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 9:58 am and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.