kaplan gets pink eye
I'm hideous! I am grotesque. I look like a half-caste Zombie, pus dripping from my eye sockets and gluing lashes in clumps. My summer vacation is off to an inauspicious start, no doubt, with a waning strep throat and what the physician's assistant called the worse case of conjunctivitis she'd ever seen. My eye was swollen shut! Pinkeye bullshit, it looks like someone popped a cherry tomato into my ocular cavity. A cherry tomato that leaks yellow goo. Toss that into your salad and dress it. Thankfully I received prescribed antibiotics yesterday so I may get to schedule some non-solitary fun for the weekend (I'm looking at you, Julee... with my hideous crimson orb), or perhaps next week. I love antibiotics. They ease real suffering! My friend Radhika refuses to treat her infectious maladies with pills or drops, which does smack of some kind of noble faith in the body, but I can still call it imprudent. There's definitely a line to be drawn. A headache can wrestle itself to death in the dark without any chemical assistance, but when important body parts start leaking like cracked eggs, I think it's time to partake in the fruits of science.

A medical theme is developing. Next month my mother will undergo a major reparative operation on her lower spine, in a last-ditch effort to relieve herself of some long-agonizing pain and, hopefully, to help her walk better. I'm to care for her, with the occasional help of my sister Sage, while she recovers. I've assisted her after previous operations and the work was surely no fun, but I have no idea what is in store for us this summer. As worried as I am, my mom is nervous to the point of neuroses. She swallows all her fear and it comes out as an obsessive need to keep every corner of our house in an impossibly pristine state, I guess her way of maintaining orderliness, exerting control. Her body is being undone, has been shifting from within for years and years, and for someone who has put up with so much pain and real stress, I'd say she's extraordinarily rosy for all of it. Her mind has kept well through years of daily pain. Some minds do not. Apart from my sickness, though brief, and my mother's continuing unease, I must also contend with a father who is, to say the least, unhinged. Since I've come home he's been calling me incessantly, begging for my company, speaking to me about things which, I imagine, most fathers do not speak to their sons about. As I recall, though, that's always been the case. I seem to have talked him down from his dusty old ledge sometime in my last couple visits, and though he's put thoughts of suicide back into his dresser drawer, I suspect it's only a matter of a few weeks until his mood swings back in that direction or his fear of eternal damnation wanes. I might be wrong. He seems more conscious of himself now than I ever remember him being, and I like thinking that this is because I now speak to him honestly, and do not file down my points. He is now openly questioning why, for instance, the older two of his three children want nothing to do with him, and he is finding answers that might be of some wound-binding power. I can only hope so.

I've got a job to find. I don't really like these summers in Florida. My urge toward indolence almost always overcomes my better-laid plans, though I imagine this summer might be different. I'll be busy enough. Annandale seems so far away.