Thursday 20 April 2017

$200 later

Bike is fixed. Thank fuck. Indignities of interim transportation measures culminated this afternoon in a nine-minute journey on the Upfield line, which was sickeningly vile beyond the power of words to express.

I survived today, but I have a knot of painful tension underneath the centre of my ribcage, and the vibrations are still buzzing away in there as well. It buzzes for about two or three seconds, goes still, then buzzes again maybe one or two minutes later. I am considering whether I ought to go to the doctor.

On the one hand, obviously it's a completely stupid complaint, and all that will happen is I will be charged $72, be stared at with a puzzled frowny face, be squeezed and prodded, sit there while a lot of words are typed into the computer, go at an inconvenient time to an inconvenient place like Northland and have my poor, small, ridiculously vibrating breast mashed flat in a mammogram machine, go back to the GP and be told there is nothing the matter and if I ignore it, maybe it'll go away.

On the other hand, the infinite annoyance of wondering if it's cancer or something. Will that wondering drive me insane? Past experience suggests that what drives me insane tends to be not a stressful experience such as sleep deprivation alone, but the stressful experience plus the anxiety of worrying all the time about how I'm going to cope when things get even worse than they are right now.

Well, I don't know what to do so I will sleep on it. Not on my breast per se, I tried that last night and it still buzzed, but on the dilemma.

I am very much looking forward to riding to work tomorrow. The sunrises are so beautiful at the moment. I have missed all my friends that I regularly see on my way to work in the mornings, namely the garbage truck man who always double parks in the bike lane in Rathdowne St, and this cat, Mimi, who lives in Cardigan St but chooses to do her loitering in Faraday St, and who am you or are I to judge her for that? I think she may be trouble, certainly she is not smart enough to avoid getting bitten in the tail.

Without a doubt getting to work and back will be much more fun than what is going to happen in between, which will involve between six and eight thousand school children and possibly some rain, in which case it will also involve the distribution of between six and eight thousand plastic ponchos. I checked, and it is still that case that I cannot even.

The one riding to work problem which now remains unresolved is the thorny one of where to get coffee on the way now that Brunetti's has been callously discarded upon the scrapheap of Progress.  I've tried several options and none is good. Here's the scorecard:

Yuck cafe on the corner of Swanston and Little Collins, behind the big chessboard
- is open to the outdoors which is good
- on the correct side of the street, also very good
- just the right distance from work, not too close and not too far
- coffee is nauseating which is terrible
- one customer was smoking and another had an actual droplet hanging off the end of his nose

Various cafes at Federation Square
- all closed at 7 am which makes them entirely useless to me

Coffee stand in a sort of tent outside the Concert Hall
- open to outdoors : tick
On wrong side of road
- Coffee horrible
- staff needlessly sarky
- only do takeaway cups argh!

Coffee van also outside the Arts Centre but a bit further back towards the city
- Outside, good
- coffee expensive, too hot, too weak, and burnt
- repulsive lycra-clad cyclists scene thing going on there
- man operating it a bit of a creep
- also hasn't been there for a couple of weeks, so even if all the above were different, still a useless piece of shit-coffee-vending shit.

Which kind of only leaves the last possible option before I actually get to work:

Office worker lunch shop place across from Domain interchange
- Seriously on the wrong side of the road - it will take two minutes to get across St Kilda Road here in the mornings
- but, coffee is tolerable, and furthermore is Bucket-o-coffee, with what is called 'large' in most places called 'medium' here
- The older man in there said to me this morning, hello darling, lovely day isn't it?
me: Yes it really is. The best. (honestly, it was.)
him: great to be alive huh?
me: oh yeah!
him: Better than lying on your back dead in a cemetery hey!
me: that is absolutely true.


2 comments:

JahTeh said...

Perhaps the buzzing is just a little jangled nerve from the bike fall. Sometimes if I've had an overload day, when I finally hit the bed, my whole body will quietly buzz as though the nerves are winding down in some wild Irish pub.

lucy tartan said...

Yes, that possibility occurred to me too and the GP thinks it is the most likely cause, but she also found a tiny little grainy patch that I'd not noticed. There might not be any connection between the two things. On the whole I kind of think this is where over-testing leads: a lot of worrying about absolutely nothing. Still gonna get the scan though.