What's New in My Life Lately

What's new in my life lately? asks the Long & Short Reviews prompt. 

This is not a pleasant question. A new writing gig, welcome but not likely to make me rich or famous. No news is good news from the animals, I suppose, and from The Nephews (at least, no news from them that needs to be published). No new love interest. No new book for sale. One thing that is new: I managed to be ill enough, with the virus tag team plus glyphosate plus food poisoning, in January to be feeling a long, slow process of recovery instead of the usual "Yippee! The flu's gone! Let's repaint the house!"surge of recovery-energy.

Age-related? I'd like to preserve some scientific detachment about this. I'm not calling anything age-related as long as it feels like a rerun from my teens or twenties. I was immune-compromised and had long dramatic colds and flu symptoms then, too. It's not age-related. It's glyphosate-related. Anyway I'm feeling cheerful again, which is nice, but getting back to work still feels awkward and unfamiliar. Though no longer so overwhelming that just looking at backed-up e-mail makes me feel a need to lie down.  I may look older than I did the last time someone saw me, but, children, I looked "old"--in a really creepy way, with my baby face--when I had mono and left university, too. And I felt after-effects from mono for more than a year after a blood test said I'd beaten it and could go back to work...which was seventeen months after I went down with it the first time. The first of four times.

I expect to feel 100% well, as perky as ever, thirty with (I hope) only about thirty years' time to practice and get really good at it, within a year from the day a glyphosate ban goes into full effect. I think there's every reason to expect that, when that happens, the celiac trait--which flips from being a disease to being a superpower as soon as people start working with it--will flip back into the superpower it's been. 

And I expect the exact same thing for some of The Nephews who are currently between the ages of 15 and 25. 

So this thought goes out to them: When you recover your superpowers, please find ways to celebrate them that do not hurt people you had no particular reason to want even to humiliate, the way packing those footlockers to weigh exactly 74 pounds used to do. Even 50 pounds is too much to make other people carry. They may not happen to be Irish. That is not their fault. 

Meanwhile, I went into town this morning, came home, and still had enough energy to read about 15% of the day's bacony e-mail. I will eventually get back on top of the e-mail monster. I will read all of those Booktober Blitz books some time this year, though at the rate of one review a day I won't get all of them reviewed. I fully expect even to dig up the passwords (Google's latest "updates" mania lost a lot of passwords) and get back onto Goodreads and Bookshop and Library Thing, this week. 

And, if not...I'll remember that continual celiac reactions make recovery from anything a longer, slower process than it ought to be, and take it one day at a time, without the adolescent melodrama of thinking "I never shall be well, I'll never see the age of thirty, I ought to be planning a good way to die rather than wasting any energy on plans to live a normal life," which was what I spent a lot of time doing during the first two years after I left university. I did recover from mononucleosis and I will recover from this winter. Eventually.