Am I losing my mind?

Probably. But I think I've lost the part of my brain that tells me I've lost my mind and so I can't be sure. I have noticed a windy sound whenever I tilt my head to the left, so I'm thinking (with much smaller results) that the vacuous place is where the gray matter used to be that helped me keep my brain intact. Or it could just be the alternating stuffy and runny nose I woke up with this morning. Some people hate to wake up alone....

I went to bed last night feeling a little under the weather--now where in heaven's name did this saying come from (or should I be Englishly correct and say "from where did this saying come")? Does the saying mean we can actually avoid the weather patterns by crouching under them (crouching is not an easy feat for me anymore, so I'll have to weigh the merits of that versus ever walking upright again)? At any rate, I fell asleep wondering if my nose would still be with me when I awakened in the morning. It was, but it was elusive--running all over the place. And when it isn't doing its best imitation of a small, fleshy waterfall, it's doing a rendition of a plumbing pipe that desperately needs a Draino fix. Since I'm home alone (and not attacking two burglars at the moment, like the kid in the movie), I can stuff tissue up each nostril and call it a "look" or I can test myself to see how quickly I can sprint for the box of Kleenex when my nose bolts out of the starting gate, running wildly down the track.

Whenever I have a stuffy nose, it feels as if my brain is also stuffy (and not the British stiff upper lip kind of stuffy either). No. My head feels as if the six visiting spiders, who have been assigned to be swallowed by me this year, have been pushing dense, web-like materials up my nostrils all night long, and I realize that I have a lot of empty, open space in my cranium. Poor spidies must work all night just to fill it up. Now, having a stuffy head means sleeping with one's mouth wide open and we know what the spiders plan to do with the gaping yaw. Beyond the tickle in the throat that may just be an arachnid slip-sliding his or her way into oblivion (also known as the stomach), there is the issue of a very dry mouth, and the question of whether to quench one's thirst and risk middle-of-the-night bathroom trips or to stay parched and sleep poorly, dreaming all the while of large lakes and running water that you walk toward but can never reach. Another side effect of "mouth open and dry" is snoring. If you are sleeping with another individual right next to you, there may be a homicide in the offing. If there are others in the household with normal hearing, there may be a group beating. No wonder I'm losing sleep and my mind worrying about my personal safety. Maybe I'll give the NyQuil to everyone in my household so they'll sleep soundly and my blowing, sniffing and occasional snoring won't disturb them. I can spend the time while they're asleep searching for my mind amid the mountain range of rumpled tissues....