lovingly, its part of pain and pleasure...

This is one of those days where all I want to do is curl up tightly around a heating pad, take about half a billion Ibuprofen while really longing for shots of Phenergan and Toradol (I want that angry little organ that rules my biological life to relax), and try to pretend my body is a figment of my imagination. Some days womanhood just hurts.

Of course I believe that in the end it's all worth it, and that pain as a frequent means makes the ends more precious. I also prefer this more natural state to what chemicals will do.

But even so. DUDE. When my uterus sits like a clenched fist in my gut and the nausea rolls over me in muscular waves and I can't decide whether to put my head down and cry or run to heave my face over the toilet, life is just unpleasant. At least there's usually only one really bad day and the rest are pretty bearable.

The usual back twinges that occupy the Spine of Satan during this time have been exacerbated by the books I carted around in canvas bags on my literary scavenger hunt for two hours yesterday...but oh, it was such fun. The old gymnasium was hot and stuffy as it always is (really, it's a gym. Better air flow should be automatic, right? Why are they always stifling?), and the mountains of books were enough to call my soul into a chorus of song. Not many of them were terribly good, though; or I've become much more discriminatory. At any rate, I sifted and sorted every twenty minutes or so, weighing and measuring and putting things back, and in the end I had handpicked around fifteen treasures for under twelve bucks. (As Bridget Jones would say, v.v.g.) They're mostly books by Anne Tyler, Barbara Kingsolver and Joyce Carol Oates, with one beautifully bound Wally Lamb; the really good stuff I've been wanting I didn't see, and what I did find I already, thanks to my exquisite literary taste, call my own. (I did snap up one or two of these to press upon unsuspecting friends. It's less generosity than a deep desire to lure people down the path of my kind of good reading, and shamelessly using my friendship to compel them.)

But even when only moderately successful, rummage sales of any kind feed something hungry in my genetic makeup. I don't know which part of my northern European heritage to credit, but generations upon generations of skinflints, frugalites, misers and Scrooges, with a narrow but exceedingly persistent vein of romanticism, have culminated in a passion for picking through unpromising boxes and piles of junk hunting for that one bit of treasure just waiting for my hands to fall upon it. If you want to make me really, really happy, kidnap me and take me antiquing, or to the Salvo, or Goodwill, or a neighborhood yard sale. It will keep me entertained for hours as I pore over misbegotten trinkets and overlooked books and strangely shaped pottery (I love pottery) and deadly old tools and handcarved chairs and wooden boxes and tarnished shiny things. Just bring a book if that's not your idea of fun, and be prepared to tolerate me dragging you all over the place squealing, "Look! Looky this!"

In other news, the weather is gray with the contemplation of rain, but the year's first roses have burst their floodgates all over the city, and the hazy air along the three blocks' walk back to the office from the noontide daily Mass was haunted with the holiness of roses.