Google Me Softly

Two days ago, shortly before I walked out of work 5 hours before quitting time, I googled two things: "nervous break down" and "chronic fatigue syndrome." I had a buzzing in my head that would not go away, a swelling of the brain that made it hard to do anything but put my head on my keypad. I was just really tired.

Having confirmed that said head-buzzing was not a nervous breakdown (I still have affect, joy!), I nearly keeled over when I realized that I had a handful of symptoms for CFS. Despite the prudent advice at the bottom of the page, "Do not self diagnose!" I still slid headlong into pungent, self-indulgent visions of going on disability and sloughing through the rest of my life as I have for the past six months...Eat? Too tired. Dating? Fugheddaboudit. I would just, waaaade on through, napping and napping forever until one day I just didn't wake up. "Whatever happened to Lizzy?" they'd all ask. "Oooooh we don't know, it's too bad, toooooo baaaad."

After two days of serious, non-stop napping, and some revitalizing treatment of Almodovar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown accompanied by good friends and oatmeal cookies, I've made some small improvements.

Yes. I've been google-ing more sensible things like, "Mercury Retrograde Dates."

Well, I'll g'on and call it progress, starting to blame my unfortunate condition on more global, nay, cosmic circumstances, rather than feeling totally helpless and personally responsible. Turns out, for the entire extent of my solo show (March 30 - April 24th), Mercury was in retrograde! No wonder it was such a dark time. Likewise for most of August it's been the same. I've had a few relapses to mono-city, I got fired for the first time from a design job that I didn't very much want anyway ... and now I feel like total shit. But then the unexplainable, completely-and-utterly sucky in-between months where Mercury was where it needs to be to make things nice and good, and things really weren't ...

I once again turned to Google for the answer. "Why," I asked the Google gods, "does 2011 suck?"

And the Google gods answered:

"Does 2011 Suck for Gamers?"

"Why does this site suck balls so bad now?"

"Why does graduating from college suck so hard?"

"Why does Netflix Canada's selection suck?"

And

"New Zealander Sucked into Plane Engine and Killed"

Thanks again, Google, for taking me on a ride, and then setting me straight. At least I'm not a recent college graduate trying to play games and watch movies in Canada. And however bad it is for me now, there's a New Zealander out there who really had it way worse.