Double Flee A

Have you ever had the wind knocked out of you? That's what my stomach feels like, only instead of having the wind completely knocked out, I'm vacillating between forty and seventy per cent of the wind. This has been going on since I woke up at five a.m. Ow. Ow. Ow.

This information is bad for you who are reading, because it has nothing to do with you in any way, but it will be very useful for me if I need to tell a medical professional how long this ha been going on and what the symptoms have been. I'll give them the URL and go back to what I was doing, which at this rate will have been screaming in mortal agony. Seriously, if this continues to worsen I'll be at urgent care as soon as I can get someone to take me tomorrow morning. I don't know if I'm being optimistic about the situation ameliorating on its own, but that's just the kind of gamble which makes life the way it is. That and excruciating pain, which I have started thinking about in medical diagnostic terms: a one to ten scale. At this moment I'm at three. I can tolerate without audible groans up to about a seven, though at what I'd estimate at five I was involuntarily clutching my stomach and starting to curl up. It got as bad as six about an hour ago during a presentation by the principal of Lititz Watch Technicum, Hermann Mayer.

He said a lot of things but my favorite was this, when he described ideal working conditions as quiet and calm:
"It's just you and the workpiece, that's it. You and the workpiece and perfection."

It was an intimidating presentation, but also enlightening. We've been presented with what the future will hold, and it's tiny, made of metal, and does not tolerate failure.

The girl next to me here in the school library is studying intensely a list of idioms. That must be a very important part of learning american english. There are little flashing buttons indicating new additions to whatever online collection she's looking at. A couple are are "go the extra mile" and "the handwriting on the wall". I wouldn't want to just be learning english at this stage in history, when "clear skies initiative" means an insane deregulation of emissions standards for america's worst industrial polluters, and "healthy forests" means more clear-cutting. It would be pretty confusing to learn the meaning of terror as well, when the government is the biggest terrorizer of its people with trumped-up threats of a general nature, no evidence required. Ever. And the meaning of freedom? That's anybody's guess, thanks to the blossoming theocratic, father-knows-best form of government which has succeeded democracy. Hell, even democracy means funny things nowadays.

The message I'm hearing from the administration: "The truth is whaever we say it is." Maybe it's a good thing to just get the ball rolling now, though, for maybe it is inevitable: we Americans are reaching a split in the way we think. There are those who are willing to go on as if America hasn't changed in some seriously unhealthy way between 2000 and now, and those who aren't, and want to know exactly why, so that some day far from now we can go back and, piece by piece, reconstruct our lives to be the way they were before the Bush the younger administration got ahold of them. I think you know where I stand in the matter. There will be no complacent acceptance on my part of the party's version of reality.

Back to class and maybe this damned bellyache, which has temporarily gone dull. There are lots of things to make and do.

posted by dale @ 12:57 PM