My upstairs neighbors are having sex, but I don\’t seem to care. I\’ve been dead to the sexual world of late. After being on antibiotics twice and steroids once in the past few months, my cooch has an itch that won\’t heal. Gyno claims there\’s nothing there that she can see, but I haven\’t been able to convince her to run a blood test. That was the only way the doctors were able to figure out it was a yeast infection when the same thing hit me in 1995, after the same course of medication destroyed my vag\’s enviro. Medicine\’s a heinous bitch.
It\’s okay that I\’ve lost my sex drive; I\’ve got no time for it, anyway. School and related (financial, proving gimp status, and paperwork) stuff is taking up almost all my time. When I\’m not doing that, I\’m sleeping. And sleeping, and sleeping, and sleeping some more. I have some energy in the early day, feel really good and say, \”Hell yeah, I\’m going dancing tonight!\” but by eight that night I\’m falling asleep, with all gumption to regain my personal life gone. When was the last time I saw a friend, other than Caesar for lunch last week, the bf, and those who came out to see my dad\’s band play last week? It\’s been weeks. Months, really. I\’m not just zapped of a sex drive, I\’m zapped of drive in general.
If it weren\’t for the bf, my apartment would never get cleaned, I would rarely have any groceries, I\’d only have a homemade meal on the day I eat at my grandfather\’s house, my kitten would rarely get played with, and I\’d REALLY be socially isolated. I mean, right now I\’m going to class 2x/week during the day, then when the boyfriend gets off work he comes over. I\’m exhausted all the time, so if it weren\’t for him coming over, I wouldn\’t see anyone. Despite living a ten minute walk from the metro station and only two minutes from the DC line, my \’friends\’ and friends consider this the boondocks and never come out here. Which I guess doesn\’t matter too much, since I feel like I\’m always at school, on the phone arguing with some sort of bureaucracy, doing schoolwork, trying to stay awake, or sleeping — none of which are conducive to being social.
I keep telling myself that it\’ll be different when it warms up outside, but while I\’m being hopeful, I don\’t truly buy it. Unless something else intervenes (new drug? something?), this is simply how I am as a person with CFIDS, trying to maintain a schedule. I can get the absolute base requirements done, but then I have no energy left for anything else. I\’m considering it a good week when I manage to wash my hair on my own twice in seven days. Dancing? Last year seems a world away.
I miss my old life.
None of this is what I meant to write about. I wanted to write about my huge crush on my gimp anthropology professor, who sets off my queerdar in all the right ways. She wanted to know if I had read any Judith Butler. I swoon.
As a side note, I\’m worried about school/academia and my lousy memory. Specifically, I\’m worried about turning in a paper where I express a theory, thoughts, or examples in such a way that makes it seem as though I\’m plagiarizing well known work, when in fact I may have read something years or months before the assignment was given, retained mostly vague (\”the gist\”) notions of the subject matter, but completely forgot that I read it, let alone remembered that what I read contained what it did. In my papers for anthropology, I\’m already starting to get the feeling that I could be hovering on the edge of that sticky area. And unfortunately, I really, really, really don\’t know what to do about it. If I can\’t remember that I read ABOUT something (which happens all the time) let alone that I read something specific, how can I go back, figure out what that was, and then cite it so that it doesn\’t seem like I\’m trying to pass off the ideas as my own?
