I’ve been having these strange episodes every day around 3pm where I become so exhausted I have to nap. And I never nap.

In fact, I think there’s a whole blog post about how much I hate napping.

But my body doesn’t care that I hate napping. It just goes into full shut down like a laptop with a worn out battery. Basically, my body starts an automatic hibernation process and refuses to take no for an answer.

So anyway, I’m presuming that’s some lingering after effect of last week’s e. Coli nightmare, and some type of recuperating/healing…and thus that’s not the weird thing I’m referencing in the title.

The weird thing is that I was sitting outside yesterday trying to get my 12 pages done (I’ve upped my daily quota on my book to 12 pages so that I can absolutely be done next Friday and then immediately get down to the business of editing), and I suddenly realized that I was falling asleep and had to shut my eyes for a minute. Okay, that’s not weird either, that’s the ‘new normal,’ but the weird thing is coming. I swear it is.

So I was on my stomach on the lawn chair and fell asleep in one of those light, still kind of aware of what’s going on around you ways – although to my shock, I later realized that I managed to burn through an hour like that –  and heard a noise that sounded like something in my beach bag might’ve fallen over. Since my computer was there, perched semi-precariously in the bag, I propped myself up on my elbows to see what was going on.

It looked like this. Except it's beak was pointed at the sky.

Everything looked normal EXCEPT about two feet from my head, sitting on the concrete was a robin. And without my glasses on, I can’t see jack sh*t, and so my brain pasted the face of my dog on the face of this robin. Generally speaking, my dog’s face isn’t terribly descriptive. It’s bright white with two little beady eyes (they’re a beautiful amber color, but let’s be honest here: In proportion to the size of his skull, they’re kind of small and thus I feel ‘beady’ is an accurate description) and a big black nose and sometimes a pink-tongued smile. But not always. And the non-smiling version was what seemed to be looking at me from this bird’s face.

So I sat there and ‘looked’ at that for a while (which was rather surreal), and wondered if this was some kind of strange spiritual messenger and why had it taken the form of a hybrid between my dog and a bird, and then decided that enough was enough and I needed to get my glasses and see what was really going on here, because even if it was just a common robin, why wasn’t it flying away?

So I sat up slowly and reached over and got my glasses and the whole time the robin just sat there, literally within reaching distance, and I restored my vision and realized it had it’s beak straight up in the air. It was a small robin, and it’s chest was orange-ish with lots of brown spots all over it. (And in my hunt for a suitable likeness online, I have learned it was a juvenile robin.)

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And by Jesus, I mean Jesus…like the Hispanic name.

And speaking of which, I have a vivid memory which comes to me once in a while of being ten or eleven years old and in Manhattan with my dad, my brother, and my dad’s girlfriend at the time, (and maybe her awful son. If so, I’ve blocked him out of my memory. Poor kid. He really was a train wreck, and at this age I feel empathetic. However, when we were all the same age, my brother and I just thought he was an insufferable jerk. [He was.])

So anyway, we’re in Manhattan and in some kind of establishment selling kitschy gifts and there was a big display of New York license plate keychains, and I thought MAYBE I could find one with ‘Vanessa’ on it.

Sufficed to say, in the early 80′s – the emergent time for Vanessa Williams and Vanessa Huxtable – there was no Vanessa ANYTHING. I spent my whole early childhood being asked, “Were you named after Vanessa Redgrave?”  and even though I had absolutely no idea who that was, I would always say, “Yes.”

So anyway, I was frustrated at (yet again) not finding a single Vanessa trinket and ran across a keychain that said ‘Jesus’ and I remember being outrageously annoyed that they would make a Jesus (not knowing, again about ‘Jesus’ as in the Spanish version, so I mean Jesuschristo) keychain and not a Vanessa.

I mean the LORD gets a keychain, but I don’t!?!?!

(and is it any wonder I now write a self-indulgent and self-important blog? Not so much.)

But I digress…

I’m worn out on book writing (and yet bearing down on my 8/7 finish date. Yay me!), and received the following from a good friend. We spent all day together Sunday, so she is well-aware of my recent…um…adventure.

Which makes this all the funnier.

Water or Wine

To my friends who enjoy a glass of wine.. and those who don’t.

As Ben Franklin said:
In wine there is wisdom,
in beer there is freedom,
in water there is bacteria.

In a number of carefully controlled trials,
scientists have demonstrated that if we drink 1 liter of water each day, at the end of the year we would have absorbed more than 1 kilo of Escherichia coli,

(E. coli) – bacteria  found in feces.

In other words, we are consuming
1 kilo of poop.

However, we do NOT run that risk when
drinking wine & beer (or tequila, rum, scotch, vodka, whisky or other liquor), because alcohol has to go through a purification
process of distilling, filtering and/or fermenting.

Remember:

Water = Poop,        Wine = Health .

Therefore, it’s better to drink wine and talk stupid,
than to drink water and be full of sh*t.

Touche.

And pass the tequila…

(and enjoy the random font-size craziness, because – as usual – I have absolutely no idea why that happens or how to fix it.)

So I saw an article on Yahoo with this headline and followed it, hoping for some kind of awesome insight. Sadly, it was super boring and predictable. Mortgage is some gargantuan chunk of your income? Can’t pay your credit card bills? Duh.

It occurred to me that some of you may be living beyond your means and not even know it (and besides, since when does a 600 or less credit score mean you’re living beyond your means? It could just mean you’re a deadbeat or a total f-ck up or think repaying student loans is for chumps).

Regardless, I thought I’d offer some REAL tips to clue you in that maybe it’s time to cut back a little on the champagne wishes and caviar dreams.

1. Your revolving credit card balance is in the high-six or low-seven digits.

The key word here is REVOLVING. It’s one thing if you’re racking up the big bills every month and able to pay them in full, and it’s another thing if not.

(By the way, if you’re of the former group, could you shoot me an e-mail or buy me a beer or several hundred beers or whatever seems reasonable?)

2. You have a gold plated swimming pool with a custom mosaic of your face on the bottom…and you’re paying that off with your job as night manager of a Taco Bell.

Enough said.

I know I keep picking on him, but it's meant affectionately. Really. Probably.

3. You’ve turned your face into a sphinx, have a $50,000 a month pill habit, your own amusement park in your yard, and at least three doctors on permanent staff, one of whom puts you to ‘sleep’ with anesthesia.

Doesn’t sound so bad?
Did I mention you haven’t really had a hit album since like 1988?

4. You just chartered a private jet to Mustique for a week and got home to find your gas, cable, and electricity have been shut off.

Not judging. Just saying you might want to make sure you can cover the basics before you start sharing Mai Tais and tanning oil with David Bowie and Mick Jagger.

5. You’re on a first-name basis with your local repo-man.

Once again, enough said.

I was actually going to call this the yin and yang of travel, but the Tao of Travel sounds so much more svelte, dontcha think?

I know you kids like pretty and irrelevant pictures. I'm just doing my part to keep you happy.

I once had (and probably still have in a box somewhere) some book called the Tao of Pooh and then the Te of Piglet – they came together – that I swear I bought because the titles were so damn clever. But I never really read the original Winnie the Pooh stuff, so the point was kind of lost on me.

At least that’s my excuse. As much as I think it would be cool to be a deep and enlightened spiritual guru, I tend to find that kind of reading crazy boring.

Anywho, due to my posting snafu on Wednesday and my icky tummy on Thursday, I am now a bit behind in terms of timeline. In other words, here are my thoughts and reflections from my journey back to the USA, which technically happened a couple days ago, not that I’m CNN or something such that it actually matters that you get my news in a timely fashion.

Today is a four-flight day.

Four flights, in my humble opinion, are four flights too many. First off, flying always makes me feel slightly pukey. I have never actually thrown up on a plane, but I always like to do an equipment check when I first get into my seat and confirm that there is, indeed, a barf bag. One can never be too careful.

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Hey kids!

Isn’t it nice to see the blog looking like it’s supposed to!?

I may never update or install or touch anything ever again, simply to avoid further screw ups. I regard WordPress as I do voodoo – mysterious, dangerous, and not to be trifled with.

This (uncredited) picture does a pretty good job of conveying the migraine experience. Oddly enough, mine, too, are concentrated in my left eye.

Meanwhile – in reference to the subject line of this post – I have a killer migraine. I used to think people who whined about migraines and took three days off of work were self-indulgent drama queens.

Now I know better, although I’ve never actually taken a day off of work because of one. I have worked from home and once I gave a customer presentation seriously looped up on butabital [and painfully aware of the flourescent lighting the entire time], but I am ‘push through it’ kind of person, so the sensation that my head is going to explode and pour out my eye sockets isn’t enough for me to call in sick.

Anyway, my head hurts. Bad. So much so that I spent the first few hours this morning trying not to puke. And everytime I would have the ‘puke pre-cough’ (does everyone get this? If I’m really nauseated, I spend a lot of time coughing as if I’m puking, but nothing actually comes up. Thankfully.) I would have to clutch my head to stabilize my brain.

Ow.

Meanwhile, the Michael Jackson memorial service is on TV, and I’m not watching it (why? Funerals suck period. There’s no way I’d watch one on TV), but it does strike me as amazing that it’s getting as much – if not more – coverage than a Presidential election. Not only is it on all the major channels and news channels, but it’s also taken over VH1, E!, BET, and MTV (and who knows what else. I didn’t bother checking them all out.)

It also strikes me that a gold casket is terribly wasteful, and I really hope it’s not *real* gold, because seriously – and I think even Michael would agree with me on this – imagine how many children could be fed or AIDs medications distributed or animals rescued or people put through rehab on the money used to make a King Tut-worthy tomb that’s just going to sit in the dirt.

And while you’re pondering that, think about this: If someday the archeologists of the year 3000 dig up this casket and find a man with his bones chiseled away and cheekbone and chin implants and whatever other weirdness is in there? Happily, at least, they won’t be able to tell he didn’t have a nose, because none of us has a nose after a few hundred years in the ground.

This now makes me wonder how they do those reconstructions out of clay to approximate what Jack the Ripper or Christopher Columbus or Nefertiti (good thing I Googled that. I was WAY off in my spelling, and no doubt Frothy Afterbirth would have noticed!) or whomever may have looked like?

(Secondarily, having Googled the spelling of Nefertiti, I now know there are busts of her and that’s how we know what she looked like. But you know what I mean, like when they find bodies in fires or left strewn under a trailer by the serial killer who did them in and they manage to rebuild the face somehow?)

And with that, my left eyeball is in way too much pain to stare at this screen for one more minute. Talk to you tomorrow and until then…caveat emptor!