Right Maxillary Sinusitis

After a week of flixonase, otrivin and panadol, my right maxillary sinus decided it didn’t want to play with the little kids’ toys anymore, meaning that the last twenty-four hours have been both painful and expensive. As I write, I’m both drugged to the eyeballs and hopeful that this least-preferred road of antibiotics, codeine and anti-inflammatories is going to be worth the ninety-eight dollars for a weekend consult and prescription but not to the extent that I’m too Lucy in the Sky with Students this week.

Last December I had sinus surgery, along with the septoplasty and turbinatoplasty for which this site occasionally takes google hits (and which shouldn’t be confused with a rhinoplasty, or standard nose job), meaning that since then I haven’t had the sinus and hayfever troubles that meant that last spring much of my teaching was done by shouting lesson plans down the phone to hastily-arranged relievers. I hope this infection is just an aberration and not the start of another spring of discontent.

In between sulking and massaging my sore jaw I have managed to get the final proofread done on my diploma dissertation. Most laborious was getting the pagination sorted so that the various documents that make up the appendices don’t all start with “1″. Then when I thought I’d finished, a quick perusal of the submission requirements revealed that an abstract was required. I have no great love for writing abstracts; it’s the formatting equivalent of trying to tell your relatives what your research is about. Still, I squeezed one out; the whole shebang is now on a CD, ready to entrust to the copy centre (my former employer) tomorrow. I can’t quite believe it’s finally at this stage and that my writing time will now be free to do the next rewrite of my novel, not to mention the fact that this qualification (assuming it gets awarded) makes me eligible for more money at work. Mmmm, money at work…

Tomorrow screens the final episode of this season of The Sopranos. I’m expecting nightmares, if what happens to Tony Blundetto is even a little like what happened to Adriana last time. I said to Fin last week that the series redefines, or perhaps modernises, our understanding of what tragedy is, since it’s filled with characters who recognise their tragic flaws but simply keep coming back for more, because their lives are too enmeshed with the benefits as well as the drawbacks of a life of crime (or being married to a life of crime) to make giving it up ever feasible, not least because those who attempt to go straight end up dead. Fin commented that it’s as if the didactic element of traditional tragedy, whereby vice is eventually punished in the form of the death of the hero (even when the vice is as mild as Hamlet’s procrastination), has been removed. What remains is tragedy without catharsis–what strikes me (as I write this) as a kind of dramatisation of Nietzsche’s eternal return. The viewer alternates between hoping for the characters and watching to see what disaster they will set in motion. It’s hard going. If I weren’t taping it for Dangermouse, I might well have given up by now.

My face-ache hasn’t been helped by Millie’s current boycott of lying still at night. More than once this morning I woke up to find her curled around the top of my head or the side of my face. On one occasion she was nibbling the spine of the Cambridge Companion to Kant, which will teach me to stack volumes of philosophy on my lowboy, I guess. She knows I don’t like having my face licked, so will over the course of an hour start by lying on my feet, then inching her way up towards my face in relay stages. Eventually she’ll be staring me in the eye and perhaps licking the air near my chin. It’s tiring and hilarious; fortunately it only happens occasionally. I guess I’m not the only one in this house to have gone a bit mental with the bad weather, which looks to be lifting anyway.

This will be my last quiet week at work before the February students return and the new prep students start. What follows will probably be the busiest six weeks of the year. I’m already feeling nervous about my lectures, which I have no real reason to do apart from the fact that it will be new students, and that the process of building relationships will have to start all over again. Most students end up trusting me by the course’s end, but a lot of faith is required on my part that they’ll get there. I’m trying not to anticipate anything too much since that means I’ll end up dealing with any problems twice–once worrying about what might happen and once when it does.

Everyone is Here impresses me. It’s musically reiterative rather than innovative in terms of what both Finns have already done, but within that existing framework is plenty of space for colour and creativity. One gets the sense of a weight of thought and feeling gone into these songs, and the lyrics are as much a highlight as the music. Musically, “Edible Flowers”, which I heard Tim sing live a few years ago, is a favourite of mine, but I especially like the lyrics of “Nothing Wrong With You”, since it’s as if the two of them had spied a synopsis of my life these last few years and written a defence of me in response.

All the mud in this town
All the dirt in this world
None of it sticks on you
You shake it off
‘Cause you’re better than that
And you don’t need it
There’s nothing wrong with you

Remember how it made you hurt
Even as you fight to go on
Turn it into something else
Turn it into something else

Song lyrics have a tendency to look rather awkward when quoted out of musical context (as anyone reading graffitti on a lecture theatre desk will know), but I liked these enough when I heard them to think ‘em worth quoting all the same. “Turn it into something else” is pretty much the creative person’s mantra, I reckon: paint it, sing it, write it, think it, anything to take what was cruelly unworked and make it otherwise. It doesn’t have to be didactic to have worth; it doesn’t have to prevent anyone else from making the same mistakes or enduring the same difficulty. Art’s little more than a sporadic resistance to the messiness of life, but the making of it gives us a hook to hang our suffering on, a way of repudiating the power of the people this song stands up to.