i'm learning things i didn't want to know

I was at College Roommate L's for New Year's last weekend, and in amongst everything else, she made me watch Chess.

To clarify for those of you not in this particular know: Chess is a musical in the rock-opera style with tunes by Benny and Bjorn of ABBA and lyrics by Tim Rice. It concerns the Cold War, a woman torn between two men (sort of), a man torn between two countries, and the whole business played out in a kind of on-the-nose chessboard metaphor. It dates (and is dated, oh boy) to 1984; it apparently did okay in London, but was fairly comprehensively rewritten for Broadway and bombed. (For the record, my feeling is that the London version is ... not bad, and the Broadway version is terrible, except that the new song they added for Judy Kuhn as Florence is quite good.) We (L and I and many others) did the show in college, and it was awful in a lot of ways :-/, but we do know the score, if you see what I mean.

( So what she made me watch was the 2008 concert performance at the Royal Albert Hall. )

things that sucked today

I was at work, reading some work stuff and composing my post about the concert performance of Chess in the breaks. Sort of noonish I happened to blink and then everything seemed a little dim. Or, you know, not dim, and not blurry, but also kind of both. It's hard to describe. And I shook my head a bit to clear it, and the whole room kind of seemed to tilt juuust a little bit one way and then to right itself. And my hands felt oddly heavy for a minute.

Before anyone panics, I now see that this description reads as much more alarming than the event was. It was a kind of vertigo-like departure of balance, not anything scarier. It has, in fact, happened before, about three years ago right after I had my allergy shot one day, and that time it was very scary, because I notified the nurses and they called the doctors and the doctors said I had to go to the emergency room, but then after all that it turned out to be some fluid in my ear from an incipient head cold that had happened to make itself known exactly at the wrong time. Coincidence.

So this time, I thought, oh, there must be some fluid in my ear. I must have a head cold coming on that this is the first symptom of. But I do not want a head cold! At noon I felt fine. Then my head started to hurt; I went out with wordplay and had some coffee and a cookie and that helped a bit with some of it, but the headache stuck and got worse, and I left work a little early and ran a couple of errands, and by the time I was getting home I was concentrating very hard on driving, because I just wanted to close my eyes.

Got home, lay down, took some cough medicine to (ideally) loosen up the gunk in my head, and put the electric heating pad on the back of my neck to (theoretically) loosen up the tense muscles that were clenched so tight on the blood vessels back there. Some advil to ease the headache and the tension in the TMJ. (My jaw had popped in the car, but my ear still felt pressure in it, so I concluded it was both.) I think the loosening up has begun, as there has been more coughing and sneezing than I'd like.

Boo.

(Supposed to snow tonight. I wouldn't normally care one way or t'other, but let's have about five inches between 4 and 6 am, shall we?, so we can get us a snow day?)