Dichroic Reflections

a somewhat unwelcome identification

Blearg. I feel kind of crappy - I think they snuck some caffeine in my decaf this morning. It feels like a caffeine reaction. You'd think I'd just give up on coffee entirely, but I like the taste and I don't usually have issues with decaf. (For some values of "usually", anyhow - but this could involve heterodyning between coffee and too much lunch or the Coke I had with lunch. Whatever...) This sort of thing doesn't last more than an hour or two for me, but one thing I notice is that while it does (or whenever I have any sort of queasiness or upset stomach), it dampens my sense of adventure considerably. Travel suddenly starts to look a lot less appealing and staying home in comfort looks much better.

One of the nice things about aging is that once youve figured out how your body works and how it affects your mind and emotions, you can start to allow for it in your plans, and know when a feeling a temporary and should be ignored until it goes away.

Oddly, this is one of the reasons I like the Aubrey and Maturin books; their characters are real enough that they sometimes get sick and sometimes have to visit the outhouse or the head. There's a scene in (I think) The Far Side of the World where an Admiral is entertaining Jack and several others at dinner, and has to keep ducking out ("Forgive me, apparently I ate something.") There's a hilarious scene where Jack, Stephen and Jagiello are captured in France and taken in to prison in a stagecoach - only the richness of French cream sauces forces Jack to have the driver stop the coach at every bush. (Apparently he's not considered a flight risk - perhaps the officer in charge figures he'd be stopped by the next bush.) The scene builds until the group plus the French intel officer taking them in (Duhamel, maybe?) eat some badly prepared crawfish and then, confined to the coach for an uncomfortable distance by an increasingly populous area, all but the abstemious Maturin rush into the prison upon arrival, past the admitting desk, to the (very) necessary.

It's always nice to be able to identify with the characters in a book, even if not for reasons one would wish. People in books too often have such conveniently ordered bodies: no aches or pains except when needed to advance the plot, no pit stops required on even the most desperate quest, no days when they just feel a little unaccountably off. Then again, they do tend to be prone to dramatic and fatal illnesses. I want to be a fictional character in my next life ... but only if I can get an author who will allow me a happy ending.