Into the void...

2003-06-27

4:35 p.m.

For weeks, I was looking forward to yesterday because it was supposed to be our staff outing to the Red Sox game. Not only would we get out of work for most of the day, but we would get to go to Fenway, where I have always had a good time despite many thwarted efforts to drink or smoke. So, when yesterday finally came along, I was thrilled by the thought of a day off work with nothing to do but eat junk food and watch baseball.

I have not been so miserable in a very long time.

Yesterday in Boston, the temperature of 82 degrees wouldn’t have been so bad if it weren’t for the humidity that made the heat index in the mid-nineties. Add to that the fact that Rob and I were sitting right out in the sun, and by the middle of the first inning, we had already sweated off all the sunscreen we’d put on. I couldn’t put my arms on the armrests of the chair because my arms kept slipping off from the sweat and the sunscreen.

I hate hot weather.

The humidity was so bad that it created a haze that made it difficult to see through to the players on the field. Of course, that didn’t matter anyway because we couldn’t see due to the fact that we were sitting in the first row of seats behind an aisle and people kept walking back and forth in front of us carrying precariously balanced plastic cups of beer and tripping over our feet or running into our knees.

We were not pleased.

Of course, we were only condemned to those seats because someone in our own group decided that she and her purse deserved the two seats that were really ours in the first place, not that it would’ve been much better sitting anywhere in that park yesterday unless you were in the shade. People were being carted off in wheelchairs or on stretchers because of heatstroke before the end of the first inning.

It was not the pleasant outing it was supposed to be.

I still feel like I’m recovering from that misery. I’m disturbingly glad to be back in the office today just because it’s air-conditioned. Rob and I only stayed to the end of the third inning and then we went home. It wasn’t like we were catching any of the game. There was sun, heat, sweat, and haze. That’s it. No baseball.

When we got home, I passed out for several hours on the couch while Rob played a video game. When I awoke, even though the air-conditioner was doing a great job of cooling the apartment down, I still felt like there was a strange heat emanating from my skin, so I tried to cool myself down by eating some ice cream. Well, eating the ice cream made me sick to my stomach. I spent the rest of the evening trying to recover from that.

Now, I can’t say this for certain, but I’m convinced that being out there in that miserable heat for even the brief time that we were there interrupted my sleep last night. I couldn’t sleep for shit. I kept waking up sweating, and I had extremely distressing dreams, including one in which Rob broke up with me.

And now I’m back at work.

Thank god it’s the end of the week and I can try to recover completely over the next few days. You know, it’s funny: everything I do makes me feel like I need to spend time recovering, and I never feel quite recovered from anything. Everything makes me feel sick or miserable, and everything I do to try and make it better ends up making it worse.

Will I never feel normal?

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