Vitamin D

The covid has clapped back- my December arrogance being one of the few able to escape the omicron variant has come back to haunt me. I'll get back to that though, because I want to try writing this thing using a technique called 'sandwiching' where you start with something positive, fill the middle with negativity, then end with a positive. That way you achieve a sort of mindfuckity outcome where someone feels good even though you exposed them to the nasty.

So I went to visit my best friend in Montana! And that was awesome because wide open spaces, animals, nature gallops, sunsets, belly laughs, and hitting the slopes. She also reintroduced me to the joys of boxed mac n' cheese and marijuana in responsible doses,  and sent me home with a suitcase of organic facial creams, cosy loungewear, environmentally conscious soap preparations, bougie vitamins, and,.... boxed mac n' cheese. 

It was a short week and before I knew it I was back at the Bozeman airport checking my bags next to two apparently 12 year old girls who had two bags of  their own- "this one's the guns, this one's ammo". okkkkk, America. I looked at the lady behind the desk, "this one's the skin cream, this one's the mac n'cheese". It's been eleven years since I moved to Europe and I don't really know where I belong, but it's probably not on a plane with ammo. 

Having grown up in southern california I used to scorn the transplants who all seemed to move there for the same reason- the weather. as if the most compelling thing in your life was the fucking sunshine?! When I was 23 I was energetic, idealistic and in search of a pulse, diversity, culture, a hustle. 'nobody moves to new york or london for the weather' I would say, 'they move there to chase a dream'. What an arrogant little pest I was, spoiled by an upbringing of plentiful vitamin D and happy people.  Now that I am older and angrier and had some time to pursue my dreams in places with vulgar population densities, discourteous costs of living, AND shitty weather, I can categorically say GIVE ME THE GOOD WEATHER. I am totally ok with the sunshine being the most compelling thing in my life. How do I know? because I spent another cold and dark winter with intractable churlish inclinations and then suddenly the sun came out and i felt like being nice to people again. and it was awesome.

I know there's this thing called Seasonal Affective Disorder where you get moody in dark months. I tried to fight this last year by (cringe) lying in a tanning bed. I stopped that after the shopgirl suggested I not wash for 24 hours afterward "to let the tan fully soak in". just couldn't cope with conversations like that or spending my time wondering why someone didn't  explain to her the difference between a tanning bed and a spray tan? The point is, my vitamin D consequently plummeted and with it so did everything else. 

There was a day in February when I almost just completely lost my shit. I was cycling to work for forty five minutes in a headwind with 100km/hr gusts, multiple moments of which were met with neither the peddles nor my entire being moving forward at all. After a protracted period of this I suffered something of a panic attack with somatic symptoms telling me physically and emotionally YOU SHALL NOT ENGAGE IN THIS BULLSHIT ANY LONGER! and all I could think was to get off my bike, throw it into the traffic and find a train to Heathrow where I would buy a ticket to anywhere else. But then I realized I do have some British in me because I just zipped it up, kept peddling, and eventually made it to work and carried on like everything was fine. At least it will be a tailwind on the way home, I thought. NOPE. I'm not being funny when I say that it was a headwind the entire way home. How is it meteorologically possible to have a headwind in both directions? I got through my door and thought, fuckit i'm going to treat myself to a box of mac n'cheese. I was sooo looking forward to this small salvation when I opened the box and dumped the tiny pasta into the pot, only to find that the packet of powdered fake cheese was MISSING. Did a quick survey of my lifetime karma points to try and understand what I had done to deserve this. The only thing that could have made the day more shit would be having your vibrator die just before the point of climax, which definitely did not maybe happened. and that was the start of six weeks of illness spawned by this miserable winter and the stress that accompanies chasing your dreams.

In consideration of this, I realized I have never had big dreams, or any dreams really! I operate more on a get momentarily inspired, pursue the thing in earnest, then move on to the next thing, kind of vibe; zero visions of where I would be in 5, 10, 20 years. I live my life in monthly increments and actually the only recurring dream I have is to go on vacation. These last days I've squirted so much warm, salted water up my nostrils in effort to relieve the sinusitis, that if I close my eyes and concomitantly spray the coconut lemon hand sanitizer I picked up in Montana, it almost feels like I'm on one. 

Going back to the topic of America for a second, one of my big gripes being an American is having to file/pay taxes every year on income earned abroad. So I have my normal UK taxes, also the taxes for my side hustle/being an independent contractor in the UK, and my American taxes. My entire life these days would appear to be just mac n' cheese and taxes. The worst bit is that I have a US tax accountant who "does" my taxes, which means she sends me a form that I spend 5 hours filling out, and then twenty minutes after I send her the financial details, she sends me the completed tax form to sign, along with the bill for hundreds of dollars. Like what does she even do when she "does" my taxes? I think she tries to impress me with her efficiency but actually I really wish her turnaround time was longer so I got the feeling she was the one doing the hard part. 

On a happier note, Ida came to visit! She is my friend from the Milan days and is a big fashion buyer boss for Globus. She has assistants and impeccable standards, is ridiculously beautiful, magically does not age, and has an enviable wardrobe and a figure that looks air brushed in real life. She also studied literature and elevates me on the order of everything from books to the comparative frump of my daily living. We had both been feeling overworked, upset and anxious about the general state of the world, and were mutually desperate for a girls weekend. A girls weekend can really make all your problems go away for a minute. When we were making plans in advance of what to do, she had a very simple set of requests: "i just wanna cuddle in bed, have a couple nice dinners out, and read the penis book". READ the penis book. I told you she studied literature.

We ended up having a wonderful weekend, ditching the usual ritual of working for mid morning chats, long afternoon walks, beautiful meals out, and even a late night dance. But getting ready to go out looks very different when you're approaching 40. There is a preparatory ritual which includes a cocktail of paracetamol, oral and topical ibuprofen, proton pump inhibitors, calcium carbonate, high dose vitamins, lots of water, and even some light stretching. Once we were prepped, we proceeded to the Nomad Hotel for a gorgeous dinner, where at the end, Ida asked a patron of the restaurant to get her coat whilst he was standing there with his wife, waiting for his own coat. I interjected "sorry she doesn't speak English", before hastily ushering her out to a black cab en route to the Connaught Hotel. From there things got weird and we ended up at The Box in Soho, which I will leave to your imagination and to google. Weeks later I am still being punished. 

In those days after Ida left, on International Women's day to be exact, we both received the gifts of Covid AND our periods. First I thought it was going to be mild (the covid not the period) because my rapid test was only faintly positive. But the next day it lit up like the landing lights at Heathrow and I was down for a good nine days, followed by an aftershock of fevers and sinusitis, expelling shocking, consolidated formations from my nostrils. This is ongoing. The 'rona actually took me down on the two year anniversary of when we first met. Which reminds me- do you remember the phase of weird impulse purchases the world made during the first wave of the pandemic? Well that also came back to haunt me and I decided I could no longer survive without this:

THIS is a device that cores and hollows out your pineapple. The other, more sensical thing I decided to treat myself to was a cleaner, which after years of cleaning the bog myself,  feels like the best money I ever spent. 

OK I'm wrapping this up now, getting to the other side of the sandwich. But before I get there let me just say that happy people in London are not to be trusted! There is no reason to be happy when you have no reserve of vitamin D and therefore no resources to synthesize serotonin. The happy people here are drone-bot spies from the government, or they work at the tanning salon and have excessive spray tan soaking into their brains. In fact, the people I trust the most are those who like to complain and talk endless shit with me. This is one of the reasons I have gotten so close with the girl who does my nails. She is Romanian but lived in Italy for ages so we talk shit in italian together for an hour + every two weeks and it is therapyyy. This week I tipped her 20 bucks because she is so much more to me than the girl who does my nails. And mom, if you're reading this, I just want to say that I had my nails painted green for you this week because IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY and green is your favorite color and you are the QUEEN and I'm so sorry I have put you through all these years of paralytic anxiety and I absolutely love talking shit with you too! In honor of you I'm posting a picture of my green nails, which I'm sorry also represents an unmarried hand with green nails. I'm sorry you still have to put up with your primary care doctor asking you why I'm not married whilst palpating your abdomen. And just so you don't worry, I started taking vitamin D capsules and everything is fine.