kartooner

Ever notice when you have a head cold, like I do now, that every­thing seems out of bal­ance? This sense of insta­bil­ity is attrib­uted to equi­lib­rium, defined as a “con­di­tion in which all act­ing influ­ences are can­celed by oth­ers, result­ing in a sta­ble, bal­anced, or unchang­ing sys­tem.” It also makes every­thing seem as if you’re an inhab­i­tant of Won­der­land. I’m expect­ing that any moment now a white rab­bit will clum­sily hop in front of me, wav­ing his pocket watch exclaim­ing, “I’m late! I’m late!”.

When I was younger and to this day I’ll usu­ally lie on the couch, when I can find a peace­ful moment, and just stare at the ceil­ing. If I con­cen­trate on the ceil­ing long enough, it will sud­denly warp and roll as if it were made of taffy, expand­ing and snap­ping back to its pre­vi­ous form. If I lis­ten to music, the tune will per­me­ate into my thoughts and some­times I’m left with an end­less rep­e­ti­tion of that tune in my mind. Believe me, I love music but not when it takes over and becomes a fix­ture in my mind. I’d only allow that to hap­pen if it were a theme song, my own per­sonal theme song, as I strolled the streets wav­ing to passer­by­ers, offer­ing high fives and thumbs up gestures.

Tak­ing all of this into account, I rather like the def­i­n­i­tion of sick­ness which describes it as a mal­ady, which fur­ther defines itself as “the mal­ady of dis­con­tent”. It has a cer­tain ring to it and cer­tainly describes my con­di­tion at the moment. I feel as if I’m falling down the rab­bit hole; past reversed mir­rors, cack­ling chia pets and giant goo­gly eyes.

How about you? What hap­pens when you’re inflicted with the “com­mon head cold”?