I ran into some superheroes in the parking lot this week.

Yes, it’s Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup, better known as the Powerpuff Girls! Painted on a car! AWESOME!

Part of me would like to own a car with something cool painted on the trunk, but another part of me is concerned about resale value. I also don’t think I’d like the attention that is bound to come with a car this distinctive. I like to blend into the crowd and not draw attention to myself. All the better for me to observe you and write about you in my blog later.

Anyway, cool car! I will be back with more entries soon, including a book review that I was supposed to publish last month but didn’t because I have evidently become an unreliable person who does not keep her word. I really hate being that person. Trying to do better. I swear. We can’t all be the Powerpuff Girls.

It’s not officially spring in North Carolina until I walk out to the parking lot and discover my car is now yellow instead of red. Early spring is the time of year around here when every object within a wind’s breath of a tree gets covered in a thin film of yellow pollen. It’s so thick that my neighbors actually left footprints in the pollen outside my door.

I’m sure there is a plot to CSI hidden in here somewhere in which the villain is apprehended because they match his bootprints to those left in this allergenic dusting. I think this pollen problem if fairly universal in the triangle area. I’ve run into it at my current place, my old place, and at my brother’s old place in Durham. It’s annoying, but at least it washes off fairly easily. I will take a week or two of pollen of a month or two of snow any day.

I am in Washington DC once again for Headache on the Hill, an annual lobbying event organized by the Alliance for Headache Disorders Advocacy, an event that I am renaming The Capitol Hill 5K. Why? Because I am scheduled to take seven meetings with my state representatives and senators today. SEVEN!! Last year I only had four. I clicked over to ye old Gmap Pedometer to map the route I’ll be taking from the subway to all my meetings and back, and it’s about five kilometers long. I’ll probably walk even further than that as I trek through winding corridors and get lost looking for the cafeteria, assuming I even have time for lunch. My only comfort is knowing that each Congressional office for North Carolina is packed with peanuts.

If I grab one bag at each office I might be able to fend off low blood sugar and prevent myself from collapsing, though that would be a rather dramatic and memorable way to end a meeting.

Why am I going to seven meetings? Well, out of the 83 attendees, six of us are from North Carolina, and we’re grouped together. We come from five different congressional districts, so we’re seeing five Congressman. We’re also seeing the two senators for our state. 5 + 2 = 7 = Congressional cardio. Most of the meetings are spaced 45 minutes apart, and no two consecutive meetings are in the same building. Sooooo, wish me luck! I’m keeping deodorant in my purse in case things get stinky. It’s supposed to get up to 82 degrees today.

If you’re curious to know more about Headache on the Hill, you can read this entry about the 2012 event in general and this entry about my experiences that day. Basically we’ll be asking our representatives to do 2-4 different things that will make more funds available for headache research and make it easier for people with severe headaches to be considered for disability. My experience last year has made me more confident this time around, but it did not lead me to believe I needed to start cross-training weeks ago. And I only brought five copies of my headache memoir, Chocolate & Vicodin to drop off at offices, so if they got one last year they’re probably not getting another one unless they visit amazon.com.

The last time I had this kind of challenge getting from place to place in time was in high school when I had to go from 5th period band class to Mrs. Schuetter’s 6th period math class. The band room was located in a building annex a block away from the high school. It was so far away there with an entire middle school in between the two buildings. Mrs. Schuetter’s classroom was located on the top floor in the corner farthest away from the band room. Added to that, we didn’t always hear the bell ring to switch classes when we were playing, so I didn’t always get the full 7 minutes to get to class. Needless to say, I was late several times, no matter how fast I ran, and Mrs. Scheutter was a real stickler for the rules, so she’d make me get a note from my band teacher the next day or I’d get a tardy.

So there you go, Congress is just like high school! Here in DC I won’t get a tardy, but I’d rather not miss a meeting. It was almost a five hour drive up here, and I only had 30 minutes to crash before I had a four-hour training session, so I’d like to make all this exhaustion worth it. I was so tired I actually ordered room service for the first time in my life, even though it goes against every cell in my spendthrift heart. The AHDA has been kind enough to cover the hotel costs, so I figured I could cough up some cash for a ridiculously overpriced chicken sandwich. The menu obfuscates the price with an equally ridiculous word problem that involves adding a 18% gratuity and $2 delivery charge. So I had to break out my calculator and use the mad math skillz Ms. Scheutter taught me to determine this chicken sandwich cost over $15.

For $15 I think those salt and pepper shakers should have done a dance routine before I chowed down. I wouldn’t have objected to the ketchup bottle doing a drum routine with its lid either. Alas, my silverware remained inanimate, though the same will not be said about me today.

I have never been blackout drunk, but I have a history of sleepwalking which is probably the next best thing. (The next worse thing?) Both involve doing weird shit that you have absolutely no memory of. You’re completely dependent on others to let you know what happened. And when there are no witnesses, you have to deduce what happened Sherlock-Holmes style by the clues around you.

For all I know, I might not sleepwalk at all and this is a lifelong prank my friends and family have pulled on me. Pssst! Tell Jennette she sleepwalked last night. It’ll be hilarious! I’ve lived alone for a total of 6 years of my life, so I could be sleepwalking every night and not know it. That cats aren’t talking, anyway. As best as I can tell, it’s fairly infrequent, but it does still happen. These are the five incidents I know of.

Age 7: My mother asks me if I remember coming downstairs the night before and trying to pee in the hallway because I thought it was the bathroom. I definitely do not remember this, and even if I did I probably wouldn’t fess up to it.

Age 9: I sleepwalk around the ground floor of our house one night and try to get out the back door, but my family stops me. This freaks my mother out because the door leads to our backyard which leads to a small hill which leads to a creek, which she would very much never like to find me dead in one morning. Door: Deadbolted. Me: Do not have the key.

Age 15: I wake up on the downstairs couch although I am absolutely certain I fell asleep in my bed upstairs. Also, my shirt is off, which is kind of freaky, but I have no history of sexual abuse so I must have taken it off myself. At least I didn’t pee in the hallway this time! This experience in particular gives me great sympathy for rape victims who wake up in a weird place after being roofied. I, fortunately, have never been assaulted. I just woke up in my own house without my shirt on, but that experience was disturbing enough on its own. I can’t imagine how horrible it would be to wake up naked on someone’s lawn and have no idea what had happened.

Age 18: In the dorm one night I sit up in bed and have an incoherent conversation with my roommate and then lie back down again. She didn’t room with me the next year, but I don’t think this is the reason why.

Age 32: I wake up and see my full-length mirror leaning against the bookcase instead of hanging on the wall several feet away. This happened last month and freaked me the fuck out. (Yes, the f-word is definitely necessary here.) The previous month I had temporarily put the mirror in the same place because contractors were replacing the heating unit on the adjacent wall and I didn’t want it to fall and break. However, I put it back afterwards and had no reason to move it since then. I temporarily entertained the idea that someone had broken into my apartment, moved the mirror, and then left as some sort of bizarre prank. But the sleepwalking thing seems more likely, even though I haven’t had an incident reported by a second party for many, many years.

Those are the five incidents I’m aware of. God only knows how many times I’ve actually sleepwalked, or if I’ve forgotten other incidents people have told me about. It’s disturbing when there are no witnesses to explain what happened to you. Otherwise, it’s just a funny story someone is telling at your expense.

It’s also unsettling to know what my body is capable of doing without me knowing about it. I like to think I am in control. But what is the “I” that I’m talking about when I say? It’s that consciousness and sense of self I have when I’m awake. It’s that awareness that vanishes into no place when I fall asleep and then appears magically again in the morning at a moment I can’t quite pinpoint. I never notice that exact moment when I turn off, like if I were to look too closely at it the awareness would startle me awake again.

Whatever consciousness is, I evidently don’t need it for my body to go on a joyride without me. It’s too bad I don’t do something more useful in my sleep, like run three miles on the treadmill or vacuum my car or scrub mildew out of the tub. Those are experiences I wouldn’t mind being unconscious for. It would make me such a lovely house guest too. I don’t snore and I’ll do your laundry while we sleep! I’m also disappointed that I’ve never seen someone else sleepwalk. All I’ve seen are news stories with night-vision video from sleep disorder centers, or movies and TV shows that depict people walking with their eyes closed and their arms straight out, which sleepwalkers don’t do unless they’re dreaming about zombies. That said, I would NEVER want to see video of myself sleepwalking. It would be too embarrassing.

Even though I don’t sleepwalk that much, it’s a weird to know that I could one day wake up in my pajamas by the mailbox with a half-eaten electric bill in my mouth. It is a possibility! If I sleep, I could sleepwalk. If I don’t sleep, I will eventually go crazy and die. On the bright side, some people have it far worse than me, like the guy who tried to strangle his wife in his sleep, or the comedian Mike Birbiglia who once jumped through a second story window while sleepwalking and could have died from his injuries. Instead he turned it into a stand-up routine, off-Broadway play, and indie movie, so maybe it wasn’t so bad for him after all. I have no plans for that myself, so don’t hold your breath for my sleepwalking memoir, unless I happen to write it in my sleep.

I recommend that you never get sick if 1) you are a freelancer or 2) single. It sucks. And blows. And does all sorts of things you don’t want to know the details of, but I’m going to tell you anyway.

Earlier this month I spent an entire week being sick. It’s been awhile since I’ve had a full-blown, lie-on-the-couch-all-day, illness and I’d forgotten how miserable it can be. Friday night my throat was a little sore when I swallowed, then I went online and learned that a few of the friends I’d recently visited in Wisconsin were ill too, so we were basically tracking disease vectors on Facebook. (Does the CDC do that? I bet they do.) I was soooooo close to getting through the winter without getting ill, but not even regular hand washing could save me at this point.

Twenty-four hours later I was sleeping with my mouth open because my nose was so stuffy, though I don’t know if it’s technically sleep when you keep waking up each hour in a half-conscious daze. It was more like a night of serial napping. My mouth was painfully dry and my tongue felt like sandpaper. The taste alone was bad enough, but I was most fixated on the fact that saliva protects your teeth from decay, so my mouth was turning into a cavity factory with every breath. In the five months since my last dental visit I’ve been practicing the best dental hygiene of my life. I’ve been flossing every day. EVERY DAY! My goal is to go to my cleaning next month and not need a single filling or crown. So the idea that my stuffy nose might be subverting my oral hygiene goals was worse than the dry mouth itself.

It was easier to breathe when I was trying to sleep if I was propped up on a lot of pillows. It didn’t feel very natural though, and I found myself wishing I had one of those beds the Minbari used on Babylon 5 that are tilted at 45 degrees, because I am a total dork and only three of you will have any idea what I’m talking about (if I’m lucky).

Eventually my throat became so sore that it hurt to swallow, which made me fixate on trying not to swallow, which just made me swallow more. The same thing happened to me when I tried Botox as a headache treatment a few years ago. They make you sign a disclaimer acknowledging that in rare cases the Botox can migrate and paralyze the muscles that allow you to swallow, so on the ride home I couldn’t keep myself from swallowing over and over again to be sure I still could.

I didn’t have much energy, so I spent most of my time on the couch watching a marathon of The Americans on my DVR. (Excellent show! I don’t think that’s just the cough medicine talking!) I focused most of my energy and will on making a trip to the grocery store every other day for cough drops or orange juice or another box of tissues. (Tissues suddenly become the most important commodity in my life, right after orange juice and Mucinex.) It took serious effort to get myself to the store and back without falling over, which is why being sick and single sucks. If I had a significant other I could just send him to fetch me supplies and spoon mint-chocolate chip ice cream into my mouth. But alas, it all fell upon me.

On the fourth day I made it to the doctor to see if it was strep throat. It wasn’t. So I had to let the illness run its course. This involved napping until 4pm on Wednesday, and by the time I woke up they’d elected a new pope! How could they?! I was really miffed about this. I didn’t get to see the white smoke or feel the hour of anticipation as we waited to see who appeared at the window. I woke up and it was a done deal. No seagulls on chimneys for me! This event has happened a total of two times in my life, and I’ve now slept through half of them.

When I was actually conscious and watching TV I became hypersensitive to the word “viral.” They kept talking about viral videos on Good Morning America or stories that had gone viral. Viral this, viral that. Do you know what has gone viral? I have! And it sucks! So please stop using the word “viral” in such a flippant manner. Thank you. Signed, Angry Sick Girl.

Eventually my congestion went away and was replaced with a hacking cough that lasted for several days. The skin under my nose was red and peeling from all the tissues. Finally it stopped hurting to swallow, and I was not sick anymore. However, my sleep schedule was completely screwed up. A month earlier I’d finally gotten into a somewhat normal routine which involved getting up a decent hour, something I have literally been trying to do for years with no success. Then I got hit with this bug and couldn’t fall asleep until 4am because I’d been napping so much. Grrrrrr.

This is the first time I can remember getting this sick since I started working for myself almost four years ago. Since I’m self-employed I don’t get any paid sick leave. I just get an inbox that fills up with emails from clients that I was too stuffy-headed to reply to in coherent English. There was one project that I absolutely, had to finish that week because of a non-negotiable deadline, so I somehow managed to drag myself to my computer and code CSS for 90 minutes a day before crawling back to my lair of pillows and blankets. But otherwise my business was CLOSED. I spent most of the next week trying to respond to all my emails and nearly had a nervous breakdown trying to prioritize everything and rejigger my schedule. By Thursday evening I felt like weeping, or changing my name, moving to Costa Rica and never checking my email again. (Though God only knows what tropical viruses I could catch there.)

Everything is at a point now where it seems manageable, if not actually finished. And I’m more grateful to be healthy than I’ve ever been, even if “healthy” for me involves things like chronic headaches. At least I can breathe through my nose! Yay, nose breathing! So underrated. But I still feel like a week of my life was sucked into a vortex and I’ll never get it back. I only have so many days in my life, and I’d like to enjoy them as much as I can, not stuck on my couch mouth-breathing and sucking on cough drops, even if menthol tastes like magic.