Medium Delirium

Woke up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat. I’m still not sure if the night was unnaturally hot, or if the antihistamines I’m taking turn the body into an air fryer from the inside out.

Despite the fitful sleep I managed to wake cleanly at 5:45 to have the long, slow breakfast I had hoped for – quite ambitiously hoped for, since I usually struggle awake around 6:10.

Walking to the bustop, the dawn sky was a revelation, a deep, inky black on one end and a smattering of coral pinks and dandelion yellow on the other. Beneath clouds like cotton balls, all manner of early risers were leisurely streaming towards the morning market. The market crowd is a fairly interesting cross section of society. The tottering elderly, swaying unsteadily while gripping pull-along trolley bags to fill with eggs and fish and vegetables; less expected are the middle aged women, and even men, who pull up in their BMWs and Mercs for the same reasons.

Also caught the fat brown cat that resides near the market crossing the road today. An anxiety-inducing sight, considering that the road is fairly busy (BMWs and Mercs) and the cat is less than athletic. In fact, he is truly quite obese. I wonder if he is, in fact, a pregnant she.

Notes to self: Find out how the gender of a cat is determined. Replace empty Dettol soap bottle.

What they fail to mention in the Human Reproduction chapter of Biology is how supremely effective being a school teacher is as a form of contraception. There is a subset of the teenage population whose modus operandi seems to be that the less they know, the more they say, proving without a doubt that empty vessels do indeed make the most noise. No one prepares you for that ‘noise’ to take the form of words, and for those words to be, for the most part, nasty, callow and often devoid of any meaning or value. The numbers of children who are both shockingly puerile and insufferably cocky are frighteningly high, putting up a strong case against Darwinian theory and causing even the freshest of ovaries to shrivel for fear of contributing to this less than savoury portion of modern society.

Perhaps this is unfair – I know many an adult to whom the above paragraph would apply in full.

Channeled my annoyance into fantasies of writing their report card remarks.

‘Jenny aims for the stars, and is likely to reach there eventually given the buoyancy of her empty skull’

At lunch I managed to bite down on a butter cookie so hard that either something lodged itself into the gum behind my molars, or I just stabbed myself with my own teeth. Either way, the pain came instantly, and the throbbing ache persisted through the afternoon. Visited the dentist in the evening, and the bill nearly made me weep: over $200 because of having done an X-ray that I’m increasingly convinced was redundant. It’s much too expensive to be sick these days; note to self to eat better and stop being so lazy about exercise.

Rising costs all around, yet stupidity still seems to come free.