Bel Far Niente

It’s 4:00am.

I haven’t been able to sleep a wink, all night. Maybe it’s because I’ve been bedridden for 3 straight days. Bedridden cause I’m desperately ill. Was desperately ill. I’m better now. But weak beyond what can be transcribed into words. And I wasn’t built for weak. I was built for robust, potent, substantial; boorishly extravagant amounts of stalwartness. Like Hercules. Or Cyclops. Or Goliath.

My kidneys hurt. They have now, more than ever, made felt their presence in ways more than one. Several men of the construction business have by this time, seen me clutch maniacally at my love handles. I’ve been wreathing in pain. My back hurts. I can actually feel the weight of my head, the cranium..it’s contents..and the fluid surrounding it all; the shock of hay growing out of my scalp. My neck just isn’t equipped to bear this crown.

So anyway. I’m convalescing and today feels like forever. I’ve missed, three whole days of productivity. It’s probably the guilt of not being at work that’s made my head heavier than it already is. An important day was missed. An opportunity to shock and awe, along with it. Lost, until there’s another.

I’m lying on the mattress by the floor, inches away from the newly installed French windows in my parents’ bedroom (my boudoir is being refurbished). They used to open up. Now they glide instead. They’ve been painted shiny, new, gleaming, white. We have yet to hoist the drapes (a morbid shade of pistachio, no doubt). But mum’s been rather creative in stringing one of the older debacles on the faux clothesline, hence protecting our modesty from the world at large.

My sudden, unexpected confinement has caught me by surprise. Tonight, I’ve had some chance to read a few chapters by the fading light of my cell phone. I’m reading about Italy and have just started following the protagonist’s journey through India. The book isn’t as haute as I was lead on to believe. It has its moments; but I shan’t heap colossal amounts of praise for it.

Strangely, Elizabeth’s plight isn’t entirely unlike my own. Or most other women born to the manner. Probably why it’s garnered the kind of adulation from quarter’s totally expected. Her monologue about Rome, its people and the language, aren’t zesty the way I’d expected for it to be. But then, Rome’s hard to pin down. She has always been an illustriously majestic home to the haughty and opulently ostentatious nobility of the human race.  She is a work of art that exalts the imagination and no book is grand enough to contain it.

What I find delightful is Liz’s lack of prosaic and philosophical reasons for spending an obscene amount of time therein. Decadent Roman cuisine accompanied by a sartorial dabble of Italian is all she’s after. Which is where I can draw the similarities. Food and the love of assorted languages is about all purpose I have in life.

And travel. I yearn to backpack through Europe, map the silk route, trace the aristocratic walk of the Pharaohs, snorkel with exotic varieties of fish off the coast of Bora-Bora, learn the art of origami and tea making from the Japanese, there’s simply too much on the agenda – and not nearly enough dosh to back it all up.

I’ve been toying with the idea of blogging elsewhere, only because ‘they’ offer me the functionality of advertising and hence earning money. I could SO do with some money rolling into my arid PayPal account.

Cause the irrefutable truth is, I’m just too unpretty to hoe my way around the universe.

~ by alternativefrock on October 26, 2007.