Disconnect me from my bones
So I posted those pictures from the first night of Readercon and I went to bed at a nicely self-protective hour and at six in the morning I woke with food poisoning, because even if I have so far managed to stave off the opium addiction, apparently my life as a classically educated, chronically ill poet is incomplete if I am not nigh dying in a garret somewhere. I blame the salad. Which I ate at the hotel restaurant. I crawled out of my room in time for my reading and drifted greenly around the dealer's room and then I crawled back. I am fairly confident that I ran a fever for the rest of the day; even after the icy vertiginous nausea had mostly passed off, the racking chills and the skin-ache and joint-ache stuck around and I was told charmingly after the fact that I looked sort of grey. I managed to eat some tomato soup in the evening via the good offices of ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks and ashnistrike and had a lovely interaction with phi and their foster son that mostly involved me lying on my bed listening to folktales. I took a shower and kind of fainted. I went to bed at midnight.
Fortunately for my programming, both the nausea and the fever were gone by the time I got up today: I was exhausted, but not ridiculously unwell. The panel on poetry and comedy was really about five panels packed into the same spring-loaded can and exploded appropriately in all directions once we took the cap off, including impromptu singing, quoting of Shakespeare, reading of poetry, and technical analysis of standup from the panelists and composing of limericks by the audience; the Ig Nobel dramatic readings were conjoinedly funny and horrifying, also included singing now that you mention it, and I got to walk around precariously gesturing with a plastic cup full of water while reading from a paper about coffee spills. I did not manage dinner per se, but I have eaten two fruit cups and a large handful of crunchy things, plus some highly salted corn chips that Michael Cisco wasn't getting around to fast enough. Nice conversation in a sort of casual round-robin as people came and went through the lobby. Wandered through the halls and ran into more people in an enjoyable brief-comet kind of way.
But I have books, which is the other point of attending a convention: Iain McIntyre's On the Fly! Hobo Literature and Songs, 1879–1941 (2018) and Barbara Krasnoff's The History of Soul 2065 (2019), whose launch party I ducked in and out of (everyone was having fun and it was loud). I have a new stack of DVDs fromhandful_ofdust. And I have a pendant of labradorite from Elise Matthesen, enclosed within billows of silver wire and called "Was Ice, Am Ocean"; it has a shipwreck in its berg-blue, gold-washed iridescence and I am afraid that I associate it strongly with the Franklin expedition, which may or may not work out to anything. Admittedly I might have associated it with more general polar themes if I had not spent damn near all of yesterday feeling like an extra in some really weird AU of The Terror (2018), the lead-poisoned freezing hallucinatory bit near the end. Alternately, blame Jared Harris.
I have two more panels tomorrow and should really be asleep. But today was so much better than Friday.
rushthatspeaks and ashnistrike and had a lovely interaction with phi and their foster son that mostly involved me lying on my bed listening to folktales. I took a shower and kind of fainted. I went to bed at midnight.Fortunately for my programming, both the nausea and the fever were gone by the time I got up today: I was exhausted, but not ridiculously unwell. The panel on poetry and comedy was really about five panels packed into the same spring-loaded can and exploded appropriately in all directions once we took the cap off, including impromptu singing, quoting of Shakespeare, reading of poetry, and technical analysis of standup from the panelists and composing of limericks by the audience; the Ig Nobel dramatic readings were conjoinedly funny and horrifying, also included singing now that you mention it, and I got to walk around precariously gesturing with a plastic cup full of water while reading from a paper about coffee spills. I did not manage dinner per se, but I have eaten two fruit cups and a large handful of crunchy things, plus some highly salted corn chips that Michael Cisco wasn't getting around to fast enough. Nice conversation in a sort of casual round-robin as people came and went through the lobby. Wandered through the halls and ran into more people in an enjoyable brief-comet kind of way.
But I have books, which is the other point of attending a convention: Iain McIntyre's On the Fly! Hobo Literature and Songs, 1879–1941 (2018) and Barbara Krasnoff's The History of Soul 2065 (2019), whose launch party I ducked in and out of (everyone was having fun and it was loud). I have a new stack of DVDs from
handful_ofdust. And I have a pendant of labradorite from Elise Matthesen, enclosed within billows of silver wire and called "Was Ice, Am Ocean"; it has a shipwreck in its berg-blue, gold-washed iridescence and I am afraid that I associate it strongly with the Franklin expedition, which may or may not work out to anything. Admittedly I might have associated it with more general polar themes if I had not spent damn near all of yesterday feeling like an extra in some really weird AU of The Terror (2018), the lead-poisoned freezing hallucinatory bit near the end. Alternately, blame Jared Harris.I have two more panels tomorrow and should really be asleep. But today was so much better than Friday.
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Books, though. That is a something.
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Thank you! I feel I should warn you that got over the food poisoning and had something else go weirdly, medically wrong, which I feel was even less called-for. But I had a good Readercon nonetheless!
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Thank you. It did not feature the return of food poisoning!
Books, though. That is a something.
For my limited budget, I feel I made out like the proverbial bandit. I am looking forward.
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Thank you! I had food poisoning at the first con I ever attended—Necon, in 2004—but that did not make it an experience I wanted to repeat!
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Thank you!
(It was wonderful to see you, even briefly. I hope I made that sufficiently clear.)
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I love the pendant—I don't know if it will be a story or a poem or anything so direct, but I am planning to find it a ribbon or a chain for NecronomiCon. I just feel very betrayed by the salad. It's not the weather to eat hot food!
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Thank you! Physiologically, this weekend was N-V-T-S, nuts.
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Thank you. It just felt profoundly unnecessary.
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Thank you! It really only lasted about twenty-four hours, which I appreciate in the way where I would appreciate even more it not having lasted at all.
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I think the new rule is "Avoid hotel salads whenever possible."
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They had never done me wrong before! On the other hand, when I mentioned the food poisoning to another guest last night, immediately their partner turned to me: "Was it the salad?!" I think there were others.
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That Poetry and Comedy panel was one of the most enjoyable I've ever attended--and ever so much funnier than most comedy shows I've attended.
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I've heard of three people beyond myself by now. I wondered if it was a romaine thing. (I thought if it was on the menu, it was safe!)
That Poetry and Comedy panel was one of the most enjoyable I've ever attended--and ever so much funnier than most comedy shows I've attended.
Thank you! Tell
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Thank you! I feel I was doing just fine being strung-out and sleepless on my own!