Up and down and up and down and up

What a week! I've mentioned before that I'm bad about blogging about good times, since they tend to exhaust me. Well, another factor is that sometimes good times have other unexpectedly bad consequences and that curdles any desire I have to talk about them. A good example was my wildly successful cocktail party last August, which triggered a meltdown in my overheated relations with Tuppers. I couldn't think of the party without thinking about how angry he was with me and that pretty much killed any desire I had to talk about it.

So it was with last Saturday and the birthday party I attended in Albany Park. The man of the hour was a bar buddy named Blue Eyes (who some of you may remember from my account of a disastrous outing some years back). He's always been more than decent to me when we run into each other, so I was happy to splurge on a fat bottle of cachaça with which to toast him. And the party was a roaring success, with an interesting mix of people. At least half were Spanish-speakers, so my conversational skills got a workout--not to mention my dancing skills.

And that's where it all went sour. I'd been on and off the floor all night, at one point learning the bachata from a very sexy young thing. (Too slim for my taste, but I appreciate the attention all the same.) Then well into the time when I'd begun sobering up in preparation for the trek back home, I did something to my foot. Every part of the experience was so horribly reminiscent of that moment last September in a bar now closed, that I was completely convinced I'd broken it again. I wanted to cry; I wanted to put my fist through a wall; I wanted to know why the Fates had it in for me.

What I did, however, was very hastily say my goodbyes and pack myself into a cab. I hardly slept that night for worry and counted the hours until I could see my podiatrist again. I'm embarrassed to remember some of the things I thought and said during the next day-and-a-half. Monday I lay in bed wishing the day over before it began. By the end of it, though, I felt like the protagonist in Oe's A personal affair, my crushing dilemma safely ex machina'ed away.

Make no mistake--it's awesome to have a bruised nerve instead of a fracture. But it's dismaying to learn that I can't tell the two apart. When I actually broke my foot, I was convinced it would heal up on its own in a few days--which is exactly what it's doing now, after I went and convinced myself it was another break. Maddening! It seems the older I get, the less attuned I am to my own body.

Case in point: I was a little sniffly Tuesday night and took some zinc. At about five-thirty or so, I woke up feeling absolutely miserable and told monshu (and everyone) that the horrible death cold I had this time last year was back again. Perhaps it was but I got the jump on it with the zinc? Because here I am back at work already feeling only as bad as I would after a semi-sleepless night.