Gentlemen, read at your own risk.
6:34 p.m.
My cold is waning, which is a good thing. I met two people on campus who are afflicted with the same affliction, one a woman in the choir who was manning a table of Burmese-made goodies to raise money for an ESL programme involving students from our university and the adjacent college teaching English to the children of illegal migrant workers. I bought an absolutely gorgeous silk shawl/scarf in lovely shades of mauve (dark fading to light) for the vast sum of $30.00 (it�s for a good cause) and she sounded like I did yesterday, like a three-pack-a-day man with severe nodes. She came down with it on Saturday as I did, and I told her she should try singing, that it�ll bring her voice back more quickly. The other person was Vlad who is in the early stages when it is still just an annoying cough. The worst is yet to come.
My body is doing very strange things which I can only reconcile with being perimenopausal. My menses (can you still call it that if it isn�t strictly-speaking �monthly� anymore?) arrived after we had been to Cuba, which is a good thing, but it had been almost two months since the time before. I experienced no physical PMS symptoms, i.e. sore boobies (I had the bitchiness down) prior to that one, which was rather strange, but a week after it finished, I did start to get tender breasts, which culminated last night in what I have come to call �bags of pain� on my chest. Lo! a mere two and-a-half weeks since I started the last round of bleeding, I have started doing it again, this time with all the cramping and bloating and lower back pain one would expect. I rather hate this aspect of becoming a crone. I would rather just drink a magic potion and wake up the next day, my child-bearing aspect behind me. I gather that�s asking for too much. Don�t women suffer enough?
My annoying student had her last lesson today. I am quite convinced she won�t be taking singing lessons again since I heard through the grapevine that she doesn�t think she�s good enough, and besides it takes up too much of her precious clarinet practice time if her singing teacher expects her to practise singing as well. I am just as pleased.
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