There is always a bright side. Sometimes you just need to put on your glasses to find it.
Which is what I did, at five o'clock this morning, to see what all the ruckus was in the hallway. I had already been up most of the night. Wasp stings stop hurting after a while, but they itch like crazy, and even though the swelling in my arm has gone down to a mere unsightly bulge around my elbow (the original battleground), my skin is literally crawling from the back of my hand to my shoulder. My brother the psychiatrist had warned me that the steroids the doctor had prescribed to alleviate whatever the hell was going on with my arm would make me a bit loopy and might make me look like a chipmunk. I'm pretty sure he said loopy and not loony, even though scratching incessantly at some phantom rash does make me wonder whether I belong in a padded cell.
I'll definitely vouch for the loopiness. Why else would I be up until one in the morning cleaning my closets. As to the chipmunk thing, the only glasses I own are reading glasses, so when I stumbled by the mirror at five, all I could see was a blur that looked sort of like a middle aged woman going ass over teakettle as she stepped in a little puddle of puke. Come to think of it, I vaguely remembered an earlier ruckus, soon after I had finally gone to bed. Yes, over Manny's snoring, I had heard rather unpleasant noises in the hallway, and had gotten up to see what was wrong. It was my daughter. She felt like she needed to throw up, but wasn't able to. (Apparently, she had some later success, and, come to think of it, I vaguely remember hearing her tell me she hadn't quite made it all the way to the toilet.) But that must have happened while I was downstairs trying to get comfy on the couch, since my bed had suddenly become very crowded. I wanted very much to snap a photo of the angelic face of my daughter on one pillow and the hideously serene face of Manny on another, but when I reached in the dark for my phone I knocked over my can of caffeine free diet coke and decided to give up.
Now where was I? Oh yes, the five o'clock ruckus. It was Manny, doing his best imitation of a bumper car. When his routine gets interrupted -- like, say, when his sister replaces mom in the bed and he has to drag his ass downstairs in the middle of the night to make sure mom hasn't abandoned him permanently -- he becomes suddenly unaccustomed to his blindness, and he completely forgets the layout of the house. He was in the hallway trying to locate the stairs, which, by the way, have not moved. Bleary eyed, I tried my best to steer him in the right direction, and figured I might as well head down with him and feed him breakfast. Once again, downstairs in the hallway, I went ass over teakettle -- this time in a puddle of pee. Come to think of it, I vaguely remember that when Manny gets disoriented -- or, actually, when he damn well feels like it -- he pees on the floor. It's a good way to get my attention. He must have done that when he thought I had abandoned him several hours earlier. So I went and got my mop and bucket and cleaned up the puddle of pee, and as I passed by the mirror in the hallway -- this time I wasn't wearing my reading glasses -- I thought I detected some signs of chipmunk cheeks. Ah well, I've seen all the Alvin movies, and chipmunks can be pretty damn cute.
Naturally, both my daughter and Manny are now sound asleep, one having emptied out the contents of her stomach, the other his bladder. And I am too tired to sleep, too loopy to read, and anyway I can't find my reading glasses. But I have forgotten, at least temporarily, about the loony urge to scratch.
A little coffee, a little extra blush on my chipmunk cheeks, a Starbucks and I'll be good to go. The sun will be up soon, and I'll be looking at the bright side, as I always do. Come to think of it, I vaguely remember promising to do that on occasion and failing miserably at it. Maybe I'll be just loopy enough today to make it work.
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