I flipped a coin, and between blogging about health, cats or the Deeper Meaning of Life, the latter won.

Then I realized I had very little to say about the Deeper Meaning of Life tonight.

…

Health is good.

I’m told it’s a good sign that I have stopped spitting blood.

Damn, I meant to mention: if you are planing on reading, you may want to stop eating now. If you are planning on eating, you may want to stop reading now…

Of course, I’d appreciate this news even more, had it not been replaced by recurrent bouts of blood sneezing. It would appear that, despite near-seasonal-record temperatures registered all over Europe for the past two weeks, I have managed to catch, of all things, a cold.

I think I know exactly when I caught it. Right after my surgery. Not only were the conditions memorable, but they also featured some very strange insights in the utterly fucked-up way my poor excuse for a brain seems to work:

Dunno if that was due to the longer-than-expected duration of the surgery, but apparently, my post-op wake-up was a bit more shaky than should have been…

The usual procedure goes something like this:
1) open eyes 2) say “hello world” and give my bravest sickly-young-boy smile with a thumb up worthy of the most ridiculous afternoon soaps 3) feel intense pain in every parts of my body, barely mitigated by the horrible aftertaste of anesthetic in the back of my throat 4) give the International Sign Language version of “please more painkiller in my I.V. drip” 5) go back to sleep…

Instead, it went something like:

1) open eyes 2) instantly feel the coldest of ass-freezing cold that I have ever felt in my life. Not cold as in “gee, I wish I had put on an extra garment under my skirt today”, more along the line of “why am I waking up in a vat of liquid nitrogen?”… 3) instantly go into ridiculously overdone and uncontrollable spastic shivering, doing absolutely nothing to reassure the nurse in charge of my wake-up 4) repeatedly state my advanced state of coldness in half mumbled attempts at verbal communication…

Now, and this is the funny bit: for some unfathomable reason, my poor confused brain, usually straining to conjure up enough Japanese back at home for the most rudimentary food orders, thought it entirely appropriate to address the poor western woman in charge of my health, in the most whining and dramatic Japanese I have ever heard myself pronounce…

It took me many long seconds to realize that “Tsu… me… taaaaai, Tsumetaaaaai…” wasn’t gonna get me an electric blanket any time soon, but likely a trip back to the surgeon, with recommendations to check if he hadn’t left a few loose screws in the finish…

Actually, beside the fact that it now appears this cold wasn’t as much in my head as I thought: it’s kinda neat…

I don’t dream in Japanese. In terms of self-validation of my language skills, chemically-induced semi-coma is the best I got so far… If you think I’m above stroking my ego over such measly victory, you are dearly underestimating the powers of my bottomless hubris and propension to self-love in all its incarnations.

Nevermind the fact that my next attempt at communicating with a Japanese nurse, should it ever occur, will no doubt consist of my informing her that 私のホバークラフト は鰻が一杯です。 or something similarly skillful…