Waaaaah.

[waid]

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.

Comments

[ketchup-fights.livejournal.com]

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!

[w-a-i-d.livejournal.com]

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.

[ketchup-fights.livejournal.com]

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!