My grandfather sent the entire Isaac Asimov Foundation Series down for David to read. Of course I instantly absorb any book that comes in the house so I also started reading.
I had my doubts though. I tried to read Foundation in high school. It was another one of those dipshit teacher moments where the teacher asks a one off question about Isaac Asimov or something and
we didn’t know the answer. The question was not related to the subject we were studying, it was just sort of tengentially related. Very few kids knew the answer and the teacher went on about “kids of today” and how we’re just interested in our MTV and our wacky rock musics and something.
On a side note, I love when adults start up with that “kids today…” crap. Hey! Those kids are your kids! You are their parents or relatives or teachers or someone who interacts with them. This is when they are malleable, this is when they are forming, this is the time to take interest and do something. We are all responsible for the next generation. Every one of us is obligated to put forth some effort, even if that effort is to not act like a jackass in front of them. These are the kids that will be employed in your nursing home…think about that!
So, okay. I hadn’t read any Asimov. I was 16 and figured that I should probably read this as it was considered a classic and whatnot. I did my duty and went to the library and checked it out. It was dry. Really dry. I was a reader and my range of books was significant, but I just couldn’t read this. So I put it down and picked up Master of the Game to find something vaguely smutty.
As I got older and read more science fiction (and you know I like me some science fiction…I mean like it to some degrees BEFORE that point on the scale where you have angry discussions on who would win in a fight, Gimli or the Alien, and that point where you dress up like the Monolith, or write slash fiction for Ford Prefect/Michael Valentine) I began to form opinions (yes, i have opinions). There was a whole subset of science fiction that I dubbed 1960’s White Guy Sci Fi, and that included JG Ballard, Asimov and Heinlein and I didn’t care for it. Actually, one day I will dig up Heinlein’s rotting corpse and punch him in the hollow where his soul never lived.
So yeah, I accept that I’m not so UP on those authors.
And yeah, I admit that I haven’t read everyone I put in the category. The ones I had read or tried to read all had the same tone to them. A tone that made me inexcusably angry (God, I fucking hated Stranger in a Strange Land. ooooh look at us, we’re so enlightened that we never hurry or get upset! we’re so enlightened we have religious orgies that play out the fantasies of our perverted author! we tell everyone that they are god!!).
I started to read Prelude to Foundation. I was a little put off at first as it did have that same tone (even though it was written in the 80’s), but I stuck with it and learned that even if is had a vague Heinlien formation and a little bit of JG Ballard (aaaagh) it was not the same attitudes or story. Phew. I finished it this morning while I was soaking in the tub (insomniiiiaaaaaaaac waking up at 4:30!) and it wasn’t bad. It was surprisingly predictable, but that’s okay. and you got a little bit of the “wink wink nudge nudge” when it started since it was the prelude written for the books that were already famous and written about character the readers (presumably) already knew, but that passed readily enough.
My only beef with the book. My only real complaint…The last line. The last couple paragraphs are pretty bad and they feel forced, but that last line…I’m just saying…If I hadn’t liked the rest of the book and I got to that last line I would transported myself through time right from the bath tub and gone to the editor’s house and punched him. And then zapped back to my warm tub.
Then I would go on wikipedia and read the bio of his editor and there will be a section in there about the mysterious and angry dwarf that showed up naked and soaking when and punched him and then disappeared. And someone would mention his alcoholism.

All winter i’d been tired. Tired and logey and crabby and inert. And unmotivated. And lazy. And headachy.
A few times I tried to make an assessment of the situation. While I am usually all those things and more, I seemed to be all those things to a much higher degree than before. I went through the possible options, what had changed, what needed to be changed, what secret attacks might have been set against me.
I came to 2 conclusions

1. Carbon monoxide poisoning in really really low levels. Not the kind that just kills you but the kind that just makes you stupid and lazy and irritable and crabby and dumb.
2. I am a bad person. I find that the older I get the harder I am on myself about being lazy or crabby or inert. I just started assuming I was in an infinite loop of lazy because I am bad because I am lazy because I am bad.

Last week the headache got terrible and I had to put my “SHHHHHHHH” sign on my desk to keep people quiet. Slowly, through the fog, a pinprick of light scratched at me. Had I noticed that my nose had been gummy and problematic? Did I not think that was peculiar since my nose is generally unproblematic to the point of being forgotten? Had it not occurred to me that my nose had been gummy and problematic for a couple months now? Isn’t that weird?
Hmmmm, my nose is almost never gummy and problematic unless I am sick…..oh…the headache pain is all around my eyes….specifically in those places where my sinuses create voids…OH! OH!!!!! I see. Call the doctor’s office, surprise the lady on the appointment line by being polite (okay, fuckers, if I can surprise the appointment desk lady by saying “it’s cool, I’m sure you guys have been super busy with all the colds going around” then that means the rest of you have been assholes. Knock it off, jackasses. Don’t be mean to people who are working to help you.) and I get in that day (see! it doesn’t take much to be polite! and then you can get in!).
Yep, looks like I’d been carrying a low grade sinus infection for most of the winter and not noticed. It wasn’t one of those terrible sinus infections where you can feel your skull cracking open, just a little one. It was enough to make me tired all the goddammed time though. And crabby and headachy and lazy and all of those things I always hate about myself. There are times I wish I was OCD because then I would have a clean house and not be lazy.
But then I read Dooce and I realize that after house breaking two puppies and dealing with a really really anxious dog that would shit toxic waste every time I left the house, that maybe I should start listening to the harder side of OCD. Like the fact that I rarely get upset about the dog pee when it happened. Just hit it hard with Nature’s Miracle and OxyClean and pretend it never happened. I mean it’s not that I didn’t clean it up every time, because ew. It’s just that once it was sponged up it was forgotten (well, except the maddie anxiety shits, you don’t really forget something like that no matter how much bleach you Neti Pot into your forehead!
Speaking of pouring water into a place that I aggressively seek to keep water free…I somehow got wrangled into a “let’s try a neti pot this weekend” pact. Now I have to go get one. and put salt and water in there, and try not to think about the 9th grade biology class where we put dinoflagellates in saline solution and euglenids in distilled water. The ones in the distilled water blew all the fuck up, they kept absorbing and absorbing until they exploded. The ones in saline got all shriveled up. And that was the day we learned about relative pressure and the nature of cells and the things that go on you when you go in lakes. All I’m saying is that I’m afraid that I will put too much salt in the water and end up shriveling the cells in my sinuses…or worse, freaking out about the amount of salt, not adding enough and throwing the pressure balance off the other way.
My body has the salinity of the ocean. My kidneys maintain that balance by regulating the amount of fresh water and salt you are allowed to keep in there. My pee is the stuff that would make my cells explode if I didn’t expel it.
I once made a powerpoint presentation about the evolution of kidneys and how they allowed fish to leave the oceans and swim into less and less brackish water. (or, how swimming in the brackish=>fresh water over generations allowed those fish with the abilities to regulate their internal pressures were able to survive to continue breeding).

Friday I’m all “wooo look at me! working my way up the smart ladder!”, I finished the Friday NYT crossword on my own, looking up no answers and only asking David for the Spanish word for ‘step’. (fyi: syndicated NYT crossword puzzles are 6 weeks behind the actual publication, except for Sunday puzzles which are only 1 week behind). Ha Ha! I finished a Friday all on my own! Feeling all smart and awesome.
Then this morning I go to do the Saturday LA Times puzzle online and dammitall! that sucked! Now I know Saturday puzzles are harder, but this was absurd. 37 Across “It may be activated during a thunderstorm”…STREETLIGHT!!! Streetlight? 54 Across “Encourages”…Animates? what the fuck? 23 Across “A gourmet Scandinavian Import”…Danish Bacon. I looked it up….it’s just bacon, bacon made in Denmark. 36 Across “Is currently employed” …Rewires. Oh…ha ha I see a play on electric current and wires….except it makes no sense grammatically.
grumble dammit. And David was working on some old NYT’s that were absurdly hard and obtuse as well. I love a hard crossword as much as the next guy but a psychotic crossword created by a criminally insane mastermind is just too much!