paging flannery o'connor

one thing i remember vividly about reading flannery o'connor's short stories in high school was having our attention directed to her focus on the sky. whenever flannery talks about the sky, the teacher says, you know Something's Coming -- and indeed so it was. and of course usually when she talked about the sky, she talked about how clear and bright and blue it was; storm clouds never gathered in flannery o'connor, but damn if the storms didn't come anyway.

which is on my mind lately because yesterday and today both, the weather here has been mild and pleasant -- low to mid 60's, sometimes a fair breeze, and a sky so blue, as mr. james earl jones once said in a film, that you have to shade your eyes. it's just painfully beautiful.

and isabel's supposed to be here -- not the fringes, mind you, but the storm itself -- at 2 a.m. thursday night/friday morning.

the LJ-less terri has urged me to come up and stay in her basement, but i think if i'm going to get out of here, i'm going to go west. to my parents', i guess. it's a bit of a drive, but at 3:15 tomorrow when i'm done with classes, if things look like they're going to get really bad i can turn off the lights and get in the car and be out of the direct path before she gets here.

or i could be overreacting. but, i mean, on the current NHC map? where they project the path of the storm? there's a dot where i live. this isn't a general-area thing, or, like someone said, it might hit the city an hour away from me (which, in hurricane terms, is plenty close, thanksverymuch) -- this is, they're expecting it to be here.

so i may or may not be skipping town for the weekend.

$*@&!

was walking across campus grounds today. ordinary brick sidewalk. when suddenly, i take a step and my foot rolls over. i mean, seriously, it just rolls over on its side.

this has been happening to me with some frequency lately, because i have weak ankles and i tend to wear down my shoes on the outsides. but it hasn't been happening lately with such violence. this was, like, ow.

and, sure enough, when a couple of hours later it was impressively swollen and quite a bit more painful, i took myself to student health. my thinking was, for a mild sprain, i know what to do -- the ice, the wrapping, the elevating. but if it's a nasty enough sprain and i shouldn't be walking on it -- well, i don't know how nasty it has to be before that's how nasty it is.

the doctor? opens with "i'm fairly sure it's not a fracture."

well, thanks. the word "fracture" hadn't even occurred to me, actually. if anyone was going to use the word "fracture", i'd have sort of preferred her to use it along with "confident" instead of "fairly sure".

le sigh.

but, whatever. have wrap. have ice pack. have crutches. (crutches suck. i hate them.) have temporary handicapped-parking permit (university only; but that's okay, don't need the DMV one, really).

have leftover T-3 from the Martian Death Flu. yay, drugs.

have pain.