January 31, 2013

I felt as if I were back to the days when I lived in Seattle and I knew spring had started because I woke up feeling as if my head was full of cotton balls. Unable to breathe and chased by a throbbing headache, I got out of bed knowing I would be unable to go anywhere. The night before, I had made a pot of our Dominican “cure all” tea: ginger, cinnamon sticks and a quartered lemon, but it had done me little good.

Elvira called to ask where I was, and I was so disoriented that I had forgotten I had promised to come to her class today at 9:30 as she would like to get a letter of recommendation from, but I have yet to observe her teaching. I felt really bad as I hadn’t even written it in my calendar, but I reiterated my intention of doing so next week.

I notified Lingua of my absence for today and went back to sleep until the people across the landing started to hammer away again. No amount of Advil could release the grip my headache had over me and resorted to taking more of the Claritin pills I still had leftover from the clinic in Dushanbe.

By mid-afternoon I was feeling a bit better and proceed to do the dishes and two loads of laundry. I finally put away all the stuff I had accumulated on the love seat in the office cum guest bedroom and felt slightly better about not having wasted the entire day.

I finished reading the book about the Mongols, which was written in and then remembered the article on the same subject I had read just last year in the National Geographic. The magazine article discussed how more and more of the former nomads were moving into the capital setting tents anywhere without any services being provided by the city government.

I got to watch a fascinating documentary called “The End of Suburbia”, which filmed in 2003 and purports to show that living outside the city limits is the most wasteful way of living as its existence is predicated on an unlimited supply of oil to drive our cars, heat and cool off our homes and bring food to those locations. The documentary flatly denied that solar or wind energy could ever supply the needs of the ever-expanding suburbs. Sobering thought, indeed.