waid | Waaaaah.

I want to be writing. Or reading. Or learning French. But I can't, because I spent all night inexplicably throwing up and am now in that maddening phase of recovery when you have just enough energy and well-being to appreciate how skull-perforatingly bored you are. If I get up and move around I start to feel on the point of throwing up again. If I read more than a few pages my eyes hurt and I get too tired and start to feel on the point of throwing up again. Ditto looking at screens. And obviously I can't have intelligent thoughts about anything.

And I was rather pleased with myself for having eaten an uncharacteristically hearty supper, too. (Most of my life I've been too thin, you see. Just about the lowest possible healthy BMI now.) Ugh, don't want to think about that now. And it wasn't the meal. No one else is sick.

Oh well. The probably-not-throwing-up any more part, that's fun. I could even just about get Pollyanna-ish about how this particular sort of boredom sort of illustrates another, unexpected advance on the mental health front (wanting to learn things! I used to be like that all the time and I hadn't even noticed I'd stopped!) but really dammit it took me three hours to eat a single cracker and 10% of a banana and there are limits to the power of looking on the bright side.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Oh no, I hope you feel better soon. I like listening to podcasts and audiobooks when I'm feeling too ill to look at a screen or a page.

Thanks! I am better -- still pretty floppy and not all that clever but I'll do. But my poor mum got it and now I feel guilty!

Spent ages trying to listen to a podfic of one of Wordstrings' stories but my computer didn't fancy playing most things and I wasn't sure about the reader's voice when I finally succeeded. But I can get my stories the old-fashioned way again now.

Waaaah indeed. Throwing up is icky.
I hope you're better soon.
In the mean time, I suggest plotting.
Plot stories. Plot whimsy. Plot plots.
Plot all the things you'll do when you're sure you won't be ill!

Weight and BMI is a weird thing. I've been as little as 7st and as much as nearly 9.5st; whilst I notice the difference +/- of as little as 2lbs, everyone else seems to see just three states: Raven is consumptively thin, Raven is ravenish size, Raven bitches about her weight but we just think she doesn't look on the point of collapse.

I think it would be far more interesting if one could accurately control one's metabolism/etc and therefore one's consumption and weight. (Today I want to be a waif! Today I want to be curvy!) ...wonder how that would effect fashion and suchlike...?

am talking wibble now. lalala.

It is indeed icky. Especially when there is NOTHING TO THROW UP and hasn't been for ages and any fool can see this and yet your body is still all, "Oh, I don't know. I reckon if we could just force out one more trickle of bile, that might be the charm."

I couldn't do plotting! I really wanted to, (have been since!) but couldn't get my brain to co-operate for long enough before it either just collapsed and cried to go home or got all weird, "Oh, hey, France is ECNARF backwards. Those tufts in the carpet look like a face. MOAR WORDS BACKWARDS. I think I'll play that Defying Gravity song for a while."

Eeesh, 7st. Unless you are VERY SHORT that is no good. The lowest I've ever been was 7st2 and when I gained a few pounds, I ran up a few flights of stairs and was shocked at how I wasn't wheezing and trying not to pass out while my heart tried to catapult out of my chest. Otherwise, it doesn't surprise me that much that people don't notice the difference between say 8-9.5 stone as much as you do. I remember when I found that one of my friends was shorter than me, a stone and a half heavier and STILL SLIM. As I'd only thought of myself as needing to gain maybe 4 lb, that shocked me a bit.

Though my weight problems are mostly to do with food itself rather than its effect on how I look, I do have my own hang-ups and would rather stay on the slender side of normal. And I know on the one hand BMI isn't the most reliable thing in the world (doesn't take account of how freakishly narrow some of my bones are), but on the other, I haven't had a single cold since I got inside the bracket it said was healthy.

Also, boobs.

Oh man, I HATE that stage of getting better - well enough to be bored, too sick to actually get up or entertain yourself - or sleep any longer. Hope you're feeling better soon!

I am, thanks! Still not 100% but tolerable. And I infected my poor Mum. :(

Oh, oww. Could it be stomach flu? Stomach flu is... not fun. I got very well acquainted with my iPod the last time I had it, and it's the best thing I can recommend for when you're trying to make the room stop spinning.

There's lots of really good audiobooks and podcasts floating around them internets (including French tutorials, what what.) Librivox is a nice resource for free audiobooks of public domain works. And there's always podfic, if you're in a fannish mood. (I found this archive (http://audiofic.jinjurly.com/) indispensible when I was figuring out what podfic fandom had to offer.)

Hope you feel better soon!

Thanks for the good wishes. And yeah... infuriatingly, I didn't have my iPod. I'd fled my own flat to my parents' on account of there being extremely noisy building projects on both sides of me. For which -- thank God, although now I've gone and infected my poor mother, so also, boo. But I did have my laptop and a pair of headphones and yes, they helped a lot.

It's CDs I've been using to re-teach myself French in the first place, actually. Michel Tomas' amazing series of language courses, if you're interested. But that came under "intelligent thoughts" -- couldn't do it!

I couldn't get my computer to tolerate podfic to work for simply ages, but I'll keep looking into it. I like the idea. The only trouble is I'm fussy about voices. E.g, I couldn't listen to a 1st person Holmes-voice narrative read by anyone but a posh English-sounding man.

You know, I started out really fussy about voices too, and at some point, I just... stopped minding. It's like a stylistic quirk I just got used to with time, and the only time it really bothers me now is when the young American woman (or whoever) is trying to sound like a posh British man. If they're just using their normal voice, I can tune out the dissonance between reader and character, and just focus on the story.

That takes time, though, and I imagine it doesn't work for everybody.

(And I'm still extremely fussy about voices in pro-audiobooks. I had a horrible, horrible experience with The Hound of the Baskervilles recently where I spent the entire time gritting my teeth because Watson doesn't sound that old! Holmes's voice isn't that nasally! It's like bad dinner theatre in my earbuds!)

Anyway, enough of My Thoughts on Audio. Glad to hear you're feeling better!

I hope you'll get better very soon. I wish I could do something to help. In any case, if you feel like learning French, maybe these could be of some use:
http://www.tolearnfrench.com/
http://www.wordreference.com/enfr/
(They are tremendously helpful to me when I need to translate something in English)
Also, don't hesitate to ask me (not that I'm anything near gifted to explain things, but French still is my first language, and I'd be very happy if it could be useful to someone for a change).

...did I accidentally screen this? I'm not sure how.

Thanks -- I am feeling better. And thanks for the links and the language offer too -- I didn't realise French was your first language. Actually, one thing you could maybe do -- if you know of some short, simple, possibly trashy but not-boring books I could try to read, that would help. As an example of what I mean -- I read a Mills and Boone-type book in Italian once. It was about the sort of thing I wanted, although it was a terribly boring example of its kind and I wanted to smack both the hero and heroine throughout. Also it was a translation from English which wasn't ideal.

I used to have fairly decent intermediate-level French, and I'm shocked at how far it's gone, and I want it back -- I'm using Michel Thomas' awesome series of courses.

Waaaaah.

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