Free

I guess we all go through phases where nothing seems fun. Different levels of adrenaline tolernace seem to match different people - some of us are never happen until they sky dive off the west face of the Eiger. Others are more content to have simply hiked Half Dome the easy way and made it back down before dark.

I've done alot of cool things and I'm a fairly outdoorsy person - I got sick last week and the amazing thing was that the illness seemed to kill off everything I wanted to do or even think about doing. I didn't even want to read. At first it was kind of bad, because the coughing was really hard - I'd wake in the middle of the night coughing so hard I couldn't get back to sleep. Then came a low grade fever, it was never a huge downtime but it was enough. It really took the wind out of my sails.

And now suddenly I'm on the other side of this thing and I've lost 10 or 12 pounds (yes, the abovementioned illness also took away my appetite) and I suddenly realize that I need absolutely nothing from this world to be happy.

What its left me with is a desire for work. Oddly, with the ringing still in my ears and a severely depressed appetite - I'm not exactly on top of my game but I'm eager to get through the stacks of work on my desk - I wonder if this light feeling that I will actually get things done, will translate into actual enjoyment of anything?

Its nice to be free of the angels and demons that orbit you. I wish I could say the same for my friends. One of my friends is still down in Costa Rica looking for the perfect wave. Another is diving the caribbean. A third is probably somewhere trying to decide between oil paint and watercolor for his next canvas. Still a third is an engineer in Chicago, and a fourth is somewhere out there teaching College.

I wonder if one day , if any of them woke up and suddenly realized they didn't want or need anything? I wonder if I'm the only one. What a strange illness to have recovered from.

Mazeltov!