Better, & a Question from the Audience

Ah. I can take a full breath without coughing; stand up without my head throbbing. Life is good.

Still tired, but the emotional backspin, the inclination to snark -- always an early warning sign of illness for me, but one I never recognize till afterwards -- is gone.

I've been impressed in this round of flu without how much of its misery is muscular, and therefore mitigable. (Mitigable? Is that a word? Well, it is now.) I've been addressing the trigger points as they arise, and stretching out even when I'm shaking & miserable. With the result, I think, that I'm coming out of this flu with a lot less residual muscular misery to get through. Rubbing my back on a tennis ball wedged between me and the wall -- think of a bear rubbing its back against a tree -- is great way to address trigger points between the shoulder blades. And what I would have thought, vaguely, were "swollen glands," a year ago, were actually miserably knotted SCMs. Hurts to work them, but it feels wonderful. And besides, it makes me feel like I'm fighting back.

A person should get plenty of rest, but sheer immobility is not how to rest muscles. They need to move.

Sigh. I hate it when I take this lofty didactic tone -- especially silly from one who's come so late to taking any kind of care of his body at all.

So, just what is it, asks the reader in my head, that's going on with the voice of your blog?

Hmm. I discovered over the holidays that a member of my family has been reading my blog. And there's been increasing crossovers of blog relationships into "real" relationships, & vice versa. And on top of that there's the fact that the people I work with now are young and literary, and hence far more likely to wander about in blogland than my old coworkers. They could be showing up any time, too. I write with worried glances backward. One of the pleasures of blogging is having the liberty to -- probably I should say the illusion of -- completely controlling my persona, and of course people in the audience with other sources of information take that out of my hands. I haven't quite recovered a voice. Which in some ways is to the good, I'm sure, but I'm a little wistful for the days when I could present myself as, for instance, a more diligent and inspired Buddhist than I am, without hearing a faint snicker in the virtual auditorium. Possibly I write about massage school more, now, simply because none of my crossovers come from there.

I could always light out for the hills -- start a new blog, take a new name, start a new life. I regard that with suspicion. The Puritan in me thinks that my life should be all of a piece, presented whole and the same to anyone, with a glorious integrity. Why should it need to be spun this way and that depending on the audience?

Both my schooling in rhetoric and my Buddhist practice tell me that a) communication is always, and properly, spun according to an audience; and b) the integrity of the self is a delusion anyway. But that doesn't make me that much more comfortable with it. It dovetails too nicely with my psychological propensity for pleasing others, at the cost of no matter what internal meiosis.

So anyway. Since you asked :-)