ACCOZZAGLIA

Since the new year, I have fought off a moderate case of the flu (thanks probably to my insane vitamin D intake, kept it from being a three-week nightmare like my cohort from Edmonton, Paul, who sounded like hell on the phone last night but insisted he felt better) and am now dealing with a lame back. It really got out of hand over the weekend, much to the unfairness to caitdepaor, who had to put up with my restless agitation and disruption.

I squarely blame myself for the back: it was almost entirely the product of straining it with the imbalanced weight of carrying 15kg of books, cameras, and other junk over my right shoulder non-stop for weeks on end, and then walking around with that weight for several kilometres each day for well over a week. Tomorrow morning I’m going to attempt a same-day appointment at the university clinic to verify what I have been fearing: that this is not the typical muscle spasm back pain I’ve been accustomed to since I was 18. If symptoms are correct and the simple test they can perform verifies this, I probably have a herniated disc. Herniated discs are not a good thing. Feeling pain means it is pressing up against your spinal cord. Fortunately, I don’t have symptoms of sciatica, but I predict they’ll find the rupture somewhere on the posterior-right side of my L4–L5 vertebrae disc, which is the most common place for such lower-back ruptures. The pain now shoots around my lower back, buttock, and pelvis.

I don’t have any idea how long the natural repair and healing process might take, but it could be months before I’m pain-free. Worse, if the body properly doesn’t do what it must, it might necessitate invasive intervention in the form of surgery, and this is what I’m sort of afraid of. Aside from that, treatment is also pretty limited, save from eliminating all strain from that area (sorta hard to do when you’re still commuting to university with stuff you need to have on hand). Maybe a rolling backpack might end up being necessary, but in a Montréal winter, where grit and unploughed snow makes rolling one of those a joke, the prospects don’t look promising.

There’s also this sense that as my last term at university begins, I’m spending 12 weeks of learning virtually nothing from the institution itself and am just going through their expensive motions to get tossed out of there in May, with or without a diploma to frame. I really believed that post-grad would be the “next step” after undergrad, and this has certainly not been the case. In the last term, the programme “encourages” the students to explore whatever interest they so choose, even if it has little to do with their pedagogy up to this point. It almost feels more like, “Get out of our hair, dammit, and we’ll talk to you in the end.”

To she-who-shall-remain-forever-unhireable (sometimes, a neologism is necessary to express the truth), this worries me that I just bought a $40K degree with little hope for it to reap a benefit next year when I inevitably must vainly throw myself back into careerish work for one year while I prepare my Ph.D. application (also a long shot) for 2012–13.

OH.
And in this final remark of LJ ennui (a classic), that I have felt unnecessarily ugly and socially repulsive since right around Boxing Day onward is not helping my internal self-confidence or sense of self-esteem at all. After all these years and after all the hell, you strengthen and you start to actually believe in yourself that no disparaging, sexist, homophobic crap which people are capable of saying to you — always worse when coming from the mouths of other queers — will affect you ever again, because you have found the ways to dismiss, defuse, deconstruct, or deflect it into something useless and harmless. It’s because you know their hang-ups, their limits of comprehension, and their experiences with people having nothing to do with you.

But when it happens as your guard slips, when you’re alone, tired, vulnerable, and already emotionally weary, it’s as if an armour being worn — the armour you worked so hard to build — was dismantled without your knowledge, leaving a sense of stunned surprise at the fresh wound you suddenly find yourself having. When it happens, you find yourself unable to adequately be there for other people as you hurriedly rush to triage your own injury and try to heal from that, too. No wonder I stay single and hard to reach.

It just doesn’t make things much better knowing you can only talk about this candidly to maybe two or three people on the planet when you also know that, try as you might (and try as they might), no one else is going to understand — no matter how smart, learned, intelligent, and/or intuitive they might be.

Oh, that was an LJ Happy New Year. :P