Head cold

Somewhere in Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way she describes a cria as a great spiritual outcry, a block, a crisis, but also a declaration, a song, an invocation to the universe. I was looking for the page in the book but couldn't find it so I might be adding some things to her definition, but cria is the word I'm after.

I've got a bad cold. When I get colds they're worse than for other people, always, because of the asthma factor. The sequence goes like this, from immediately upon viral infection: I get a few days of feeling frustration, inadequacy and despair, usually around not exercising enough; then I actually get some symptoms and realise that's all it was; the first day is bad with runny nose, cough, sneezing, etc., then the next two days I start to get a bit better, then it all takes a sharp turn down. Things start to be the wrong colour. I feel hot and cold and shaky, I feel a poisoned liquid hollowness in the centre of my body. So then I have to start on the antibiotics, and often it takes two courses, so that's another week, week and a half. And it's probably two more weeks where, with exercise, I get back to feeling like I did originally, pre-viral.

I knew I would get sick here. I was thinking it would be two weeks after my international flight, but since I didn't sit very close to anyone I escaped it. No, it was the Christmas trip that did me in, and the coughing boy who was sitting next to me on the plane.

The Christmas trip was a psychological demarcation point anyway in this whole move. I had to power through the first two months at work, then everyone went away for a week, and I had a whole change of city and environment and companions and everything.

In the last two days of the break I was getting my typical migraines - florid visual spectra and loss of information in the visual field, sometimes with pain, sometimes with a surreal feeling. Migraines often happen to women with stressy lifestyles when they finally relax. Actually, men too - I remember a work colleague telling me his family holidays always started out with his father in bed for two days. So, I think my Christmas migraines were from being relaxed for a whole week, after how many? - six months of very high, constant, mind-squeezing stress.

And then now, I have the cold. I have the infection. I have started the antibiotics. I am home from work to rest. I have a feeling this is going to be a millennial cold, a demarcating cold, a transformative cold. One of those colds, as my sister once described, where you forget all your PIN numbers. Actually, that already happened today, at the grocery store when I stopped to lay in a weekend's worth of chicken soup. I will emerge cleansed, rebooted, different. Maybe more Wisconsonian.

Pray for me.