Mildly Upsetting

Have you ever had THAT "mild" illness, a soreness of the throat or an easily irritable stomach perhaps. A light fever that ever so slightly tires you out, but not enough for you to go rushing to the doctor, wait for a couple of hours for your appointment. What would you tell him anyway? "So doc, everything is fine with me, except that everything isn't, there's this small thing." Awkward conversation on the whole. You want to be a whimpering, sniffing, shivering, shaking mess when you want to go to the doctor really. Surely, the biggest fear after the oft quoted public speaking and death, have to be the doctor saying something is badly wrong with you followed by the doctor saying absolutely nothing is wrong with you. Life is hard.

I digress though. It is in the middle of one of these little bouts of illness that I write this blog. My stomach is upset, not quite Gordon Ramsay upset but not exactly Mahatma Gandhi calm. My throat is sore, not quite Napoleon's army after Waterloo sore, but sore enough to be noticed after about a week of soreness. And the fever is probably at 98.61 F.

At this juncture that my sister, at whose place I'm staying, found it fit to thoroughly bathe my scalp in coconut oil with a little herbal, home-remedy magic thingy highly recommended to her husband (my BIL of course) by some Ayurvedic doctor chappie for exactly this kind of malady. And being the open-minded, anything-that-works progressive minded young man I am, I dutifully let her oil my scalp,

Here's the truth though, it's not about whether the oil can take away the ill-health down the drain with it when washed off; I'm enjoying the beginnings of a long vacation, the time of a vacation when you stare dreamily at all the time you have rather than pelt stones at it because it makes you feel bored and aimless. If someone wants to massage my head, well who am I to stop them? The ideal holiday.

Then again, all this time makes me restless. I'd love to travel somewhere, go on a trek or something. Run arrraaaand a bit. I'm torn between these two choices of an ideal holiday. One says life is short, sweat it out, sleep less, do stuff, go places. The other says life is long, leg work is unpleasant, sit back, do nothing, it's very easy to do.*

It is all about the mood though, the psyche, the frame of reference mind. It's hard to switch from one mode to another. When I go to a new place, I sleep little, eat whenever I'm given food and have boundless energy. When I'm in a known place, I can laze forever. And a balance is hard to find,

Right now though, typing out a blog aside, it's all lazy mode. In some relatively heavenly Bangalore weather, a cool place in the tropics.
Cheerio

*My friend has a T-shirt with the words "Doing nothing is very hard, you never know when you're finished". Good stuff!