This Feeling

We've been on a rollercoaster of sickness. All three of us, Ernie, Owen and I, seem to be healthy, healthy, sickly, sickly, healthy, healthy, sickly, sickly. Today I'm so-so, as I told Leo, I feel like I'm 15% sick so not bad, but Owen and Ernie are all stuffed up and feeling wretched again. I can tell Ernie is miserable. There's a certain look in his eyes when he's really sick.

On top of that I feel as though I'm frozen, clicking on news links and twitter feeds over and over and over again. I can't seem to help myself. I kept thinking, "I know this feeling," I finally realized that the way I feel right now reminds of how I felt when Judi was dying. I was shocked when I realized that. How can I compare the death of a beloved sister to our political chaos? Of course it's not the same thing. But there was that same feeling of dread, being frozen, unable to think about anything else, googling something over and over, looking for a new result, a different answer. I had nothing to say but I couldn't stop writing here on my blog, expressing that endless anxiety here, just as I am now.

I try to pull myself away sometimes. Ernie has buried himself in NYT crossword puzzles and reruns of M*A*S*H. I managed to read Ted Mclelland's book How to Speak Midwestern and an old school Regency romance novel this weekend and enjoyed both. I found I was propping the books on top of my laptop though...I'd read through a few chapters and then back to Google news, back to the NYT, back to Twitter and the like. I try to obediently balance it all out with occasional stops at Fox or others, but nothing I do takes away this feeling.