Tuesday 26 October 2004

Pic of the day: And the diagnosis is: Crybaby! (Screenshot from Sims2.) (Yes! My Sims have babied! Doesn't the baby look JUST like her father?? :p)

Silver (stomach) lining

How long was Adam in Paradise? (The correct answer is, "until the Fall", which is quite a good pun in American.) Anyway, while I didn't exactly fall, I guess we can say I slid back a little. Despite once again sleeping more than 8 hours, my stomach chose to act up today. It worked well enough until around 15 (3PM), when I was suddenly overcome with nausea even though I had only eaten a cup of yogurt and a glass of chocomilk so far. Gut pain and diarrhea followed, as they will randomly do. Not working seems insufficient to prevent that, then. Good to know. Then again, this is like 1 day not working, not what the experts call "a statistically significant sample" perhaps!

I recovered, and a bit later drank half a glass of soda and walked to the shop and back (half an hour each way) without any problems. But when I ate another cup of yogurt, my stomach protested and claimed to contain sand. Very unpleasant. I haven't been able to eat and drink again until midnight, when I was getting really hungry and snacked on a handful of cheese and hamburger bun.

There's a pretty big silver lining to this, of course, since I am already fat enough. While I don't think I am actually overweight, I am surely in the upper end of normal. This is so much more strange since the fat does not settle anywhere except on my middle. Take away the midlife bulge and I look perfectly healthy. But anyway, eating only tiny amounts of food doesn't seem to cause any problems. Many people will feel dizzy and weak, even start shaking if they don't eat regularly. The only thing that normally reminds me to eat is my stomach flailing about for food. This started, as far as I know, in high school. As a child, I would not eat at all unless there was something I liked. (My parents learned this the hard way as I became very thin in grade school, and for as long as I stayed at home I got to eat pretty much what I wanted, regardless of what the rest of the family ate.)

So eating only symbolic amounts of food is not a problem in itself. It is rather a good thing. But this is not a very comfortable way to get it done.

Not sure if this expression is used all over the world, but when you say that a dark cloud has a silver lining, it means that something bad also has a brighter side. There is another expression saying almost the same, "it is an ill wind that blows no good". But that seemed kinda less appropriate ...