High Holy Mass of Contradictions

Ugh. The doc's office just called to say my thyroid hormone levels look normal, so I won't get an increase in my Synthroid dose. I really can't believe it. I'm so obviously off from my normal self, but I guess that's something blood tests don't necessarily show.

Have you seen the news stories about Netflix having a flexible vacation policy? I've been seeing them everywhere for the last week or two, and have been avoiding reading them. Yesterday I finally read one, and I'm sorry I did because of quotes like this:

"I've never terminated a salaried employee for being tardy or being absent," [Chief Talent Officer Patty McCord] said. "There have been issues when people didn't come to work -- but the issue is the work, it's not the time off." [...]
"You're not measuring my daily hours, so why are you measuring the number of days I work?" [an employee] asked. [...]
And the culture allows the company to hire independent, creative types like Director of Product Management Todd Yellin, who spent much of his first several months on the job traveling to Los Angeles to complete work on an independent film.

Why does this bug me? This is exactly the way I've always managed. And I work hard and have always felt like I should be managed that way, too, when it can be arranged.

See, my tenure at Netflix was perfect posh and wonderful except for ( one thing )

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In other news, I stayed home sick from work today. My body is horribly achy, I have miserable cold-like symptoms (a fever, a cough, head congestion), and I feel run-down and totally worn out. Both Karsten and my boss have stated their suspicions that it's a mind-body connection thing, which is probably true, but that doesn't help me feel any less physically miserable.

I had a bit of a ( breakdown last week )

It's funny how I sometimes think I'm so good, but I'm really just learning such basic things. Life has a funny way of smacking us down sometimes, doesn't it?

or something like that.

OK. I'm not a hypochondriac. Really, I'm not.

But see, I have this long-standing, erm, tradition I guess you could call it. OK, it's pretty weird to call it a tradition. Let's just say it's a track record, then, of being sick on my birthday and Christmas every year since I can remember. Some years the illness is major: pneumonia, rickets, or something like that. (Well, never rickets. But whatever. You get the idea.) Some years, it's as minor as a sore throat and a sniffle. But it's every year without fail.

Surely the temperature has a lot to do with it. It's late December, the weather has usually just taken a bitter turn, and my immune system is all "WTF? Wasn't it balmy and mild just, like, five minutes ago?" (Of course, in Nashville this year, all bets are off. I'm dreaming of a Christmas below 65 degrees, at least.)

And surely the stress factor of the approach of the end of the year and deadlines and holiday craziness and travel schedules and all that has something to do with it. (Although, I have to say: I've always taken a pretty laidback approach to the holiday season. I throw a party pretty much every year, but I enjoy throwing parties, and I don't really go in for the conventional gift-exchange stuff, so I get off pretty light on the stress thing.)

But whatever the reason, it's part of the season: I will be sick.

And here it is, December 18th, and I've had some nastiness for the past five or six days. It's a fever! No, it's fatigue! No, it's abdominal pain! No, it's a sore throat! No, it's a headache! NO, it's ALL FIVE!

And it comes and goes weirdly. I was out of the office on Wednesday and Thursday last week, practically bed-ridden, and then crawled into the office on Friday ('cause we were having a party! and I'm never one to miss a party) and dragged my way through the day, crawling into bed when I got back home around 7 PM.

Yet on Saturday morning when I woke up, I felt much better. So much better that I went out shopping! (Non-gift-shopping, which is always annoying around the holidays. But I had to get some stuff for the big party. And incidentally, the mall -- Opry Mills -- wasn't crowded at all! Weird.) But by lunchtime, when I got back home, I was ready to crawl back into bed. I overshot. Pushed myself too far too fast, and put myself back in pajamas.

So I did a little searching on my symptoms, and have narrowed it down to a few likely culprits: alien abduction, or mononucleosis. The most likely of which is probably mono.

Don't know for sure, but the best treatment for mono is apparently fluids and plenty of bed rest, and hey, that can't hurt no matter what the illness is, so I'm taking that approach for the time being. And in a few days I may head to TUCA and get a blood test to rule it out or pin it down.

There's one thing I know, though: this will in no way affect my ability to host the Social Event of the Season on my birthday. Even if I have to be propped upright, bathed in low light to hide the dark circles under my eyes, and fed a steady stream of NSAIDs and vodka (the first to reduce my fever, and the second just for the fun of itfor the medicinal value), it will be rockin'.

Hope everyone else is healthy and happy and having a wonderful Hanukkah!

It's the last day of November, in case you hadn't noticed, and that means all November writing projects are pretty much at their end. In my case, that signals the end of my 30-songs-in-30-days "NaSoWriMo" challenge, which I have once again failed to complete. But I don't really care. All I'm really shooting for when I set about to do these things is to make myself write fast and get some ideas down, and I did do that.

I managed to draft 13 songs. I can't say I really finished even one. But that's OK. Because this was also a crazy-ass month. At work, we had a major scramble with a deadline of 11/30 (yep, that, too, is today!), and my weekly average number of hours shot way up. I've also been sick twice this month, including right now, which is why I'm not expecting to be able to churn out any more than I already have before tomorrow. And my current tummy troubles have me in a really bad mood and I'm finding it hard to concentrate on anything. So yeah, not the best conditions for creative writing.

So it's over, and the count is 13 songs in 30 days, sort of. There might even be a few ideas worth going back and polishing up, which is a bonus because I was really just thinking of this as an exercise. Maybe I'll try the challenge again in a few months when it's not looking to be a crazy month at the day job and I've loaded up on multivitamins and echinacea.

In the meantime, the month of December is usually a wash for songwriting. Too many weekend activities, too much commotion, not even time to sit idly with my laptop, my guitar, and a cup of coffee and mull over an idea until I find just the right thing to say. So this is probably pretty much it until January. But I'm pretty satisfied with where things stand, so I'll be happy to take a break and then get back into it come the new year.

Hope everyone else who participated in a writing challenge this month got something good out of it!

I'm home sick today. I was at work sick yesterday, and I think I pushed it a little too hard, so I'm paying the price now with a swollen, sore throat.

The good news is, though, I have plenty to do. Sure there's work I could be doing, but check this out:



That's a helluva lot of reading to do.

I'm certainly not trying to one-up anyone, but I was inspired to do this by Brittney at Sparkwood & 21 when she pointed out that after 3 1/2 days of vacation from her regular gig at Nashville Is Talking, she had nearly 1000 unread messages in her news reader. My 2000 is about a day's worth, and I even spent a good hour or two reading last night.

The key difference is this: she probably reads most, if not all, of the blogs she has feeds for on a regular basis. I read a much smaller subset of them and then mark everything else as read. What I do read on a regular basis are the local blogs (and there are 56 new messages since last night), flickr comments and photo updates from friends and contacts (9 new updates since last night), local news (10 new updates since last night), and a smattering of the hundreds of other blogs and media news feeds I subscribe to for variety, such as Gawker, Gizmodo, Boing Boing, and so on. And there are 1965 new items in that grouping since last night. And so much of that is going to be repeated news (how many times can I stand to read about Madonna and her new shiny new Malawian kid?) that it's going to be tedious to plow through them all. But how else are you going to find that occasional hidden gem? The social bookmarking sites (Digg, del.icio.us, etc) haven't really come through for me with the stuff I tend to be interested in (which is not Madge and whether or not her adoptions are crooked).

What about you? What do you read regularly vs. occasionally?

I'm sick, apparently, or at least that's what my body seems to think. My brain wants to go outside and play in the snow, but without my body, it would probably be a bad idea.

And yes, I said snow! Can you believe it? We had 60+ degree weather on Monday and there's snow on the ground today. Weeeeeird.

I spent almost the entire day yesterday writing -- easiest thing to do since I was a sickie -- and am pretty psyched about getting to do this all the time. Karsten also gave me a CD of some random melody ideas (something he does once in a while) and I already came up with lyric concepts for two of them. Rawk!

Black Cherry is running around the house screaming for Karsten, who is out doing a grocery run. We had no yogurt in the house for breakfast! But at least there was coffee. Much coffee. Can you tell? ;-)

Back to writing!

Think I'm a little sick. I have a wheezy cough, some head congestion, and major fatigue.

Maybe this business with my knee has just worn me the hell out.

Speaking of which, I did get on the elliptical machine this morning, and even at a low incline and low resistance, my knee hurt. So I got off and did some stretches and got back on. It was a little better, so I managed 20 minutes. Barely a respectable cardiovascular workout, but dammit, I did it.

Do you know about the history of the marathon? According to legend, the marathon commemorates the run by Pheidippides in 490 B.C. announcing the news of Greek victory over the Persians. He covered the roughly 26-mile distance between Marathon and Athens, announced the news ("Niki!" or "Victory!") ... then collapsed and died of exhaustion.

And I'm complaining about a little knee pain?