Update on Z.

Z. is no longer planning to kill himself by jumping off a tall building at midnight on New Year's. He said that after sending out that email, most of his friends hurriedly responded begging him off and he realized that he has more love in his life than he supposed. This is the part of the post where I snootily say, "Classic," if it weren't such a stupid and derisive thing to say about someone suffering from manic depression.

But Z did come over today and talk Laura through his hibernation habits (a couple of weeks of complete inactivity per year, mostly lying in bed with eyes closed, sometimes with the radio on) and they tried it out on our bed. Laura said it was not a hibernation state but rather just a meditative quiet for her, and she got excellent sound on her minidisc recorder since the baffling of the down comforter absorbed what would have otherwise been the harsh jangling of garbage cans and dull thrum of the exhaust vibrations from the restaurant that expells its aural waste into our alleyway. I would have been curious to see their hibernation experiment but I was doing one of my own, with my favorite soporific Sam Beam in my ears again to drown out the alley noise, curled fetal in the guest bedroom trying not let the rice porridge I ate in the mid-afternoon rise too far into my salty throat. Despite a frantic ingestion of two-years expired Imitrex, I lost a battle with a migraine that started at 11am--it felt like a syringe (thick, the kind used to administer sedatives to big game animals) plunged straight through my cornea, iris, retina, and optic nerve, and releasing about six cups of poison into my frontal lobe--and instead lay groaning in various beds and soft surfaces until I finally shook myself partially out of my stupor at 4:30 to start procrastinating from some last minute Contractz studying.

Which, as you can see, is proceeding very, very, very successfully. SH, who is quickly becoming my favorite puck, sprited some pulpy beta carotene-filled concoction over from the cafe downstairs where she had been filling a quad-lined notebook with indescipherable notes that include words like "contraindications" and "decathecting" about indescipherable library books that she dutifully declines to scribe marginalia into (compare: me with red pen ruining what I could of Widener's collection--what the fuck, two million books, they could stand to have some ruined). I got dinner, Laura and I loaded up the house with snacks from the health food store for my 8-hour Contracts take-home tomorrow, and Boo gave me some fuzzy love. Now, finally, I'm ready to start Contracts.

Zzzzzzz.....