Saturday, August 7, 2010

Morning coughy

You know how sometimes you get a tune or an unusual word stuck in your head?  That happened to me yesterday.  It's much worse for me when I'm tired and yesterday I was stonkered.  I'd gotten up really earlier, before 6 a.m. which, contrary to my previous experience of the world, actually exists.  And get this: that early in the morning the sun isn't even up yet.  It's like night!

So I was really tired to start with, then I just got more tired because I think I got a bit dehydrated.  Drinking coffee rather than water doesn't do much to wake you up after the first couple of cups, and it makes you pee like a racehorse.  And to cap it all off I ended up spending too much time wandering around outside in the cold and popping in and out of nice warm shops in town, which is also tiring.

I managed to avoid getting anything too preposterous stuck in my head until we went to get something to eat at the markets and I saw my supervisor across the way and the word "dextropropoxyphene" popped into my head.  I think this happened because the last time we spoke, a couple of weeks ago, he made some strange remark to me about how I was probably hooked on it when I was a kid and that's why I liked the taste of cough syrup.  Sure.  Nothing at all to do with the fact that the cough syrup was 95% sugar.

Anyway, having a word keep whizzing round inside your head is annoying at the best of times, but when it's dextropropoxyphene it's doubly annoying because I can barely pronounce it.  I'm pretty sure that I don't even know what it is, which would make it a Rumsfeldian known unknown.  No wonder the war in Iraq went so badly.  The insurgents probably had bottles and bottles of dextropropoxyphene and they weren't afraid to use it!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Pee like a racehorse" - does that mean to urinate in such a fashion that those around you look like small folk dressed in implausibly bright clothing?

How much coffee did you drink?

PTR said...

No, it just means to urinate copiously. Doesn't everyone have small brightly clothed chaps around when they pee?

I drank a double shot macchiato, a flat white and a latte. Probably not much to some of you net freaks but I'm usually a one-cup-a-day man.

Anonymous said...

PTR,

I hope you didn't drink them in that order? Aren't you supposed to start off with the milky coffee and the work your way up to the hairy chested double shot (almost) black?

PTR said...

Yes, that's the way the Italians do it. But they've had five thousand different governments since 1945 so what would they know?

Anonymous said...

I think you mean dextromethorphan for the cough syrup. Dextropropoxyphene is a pain reliever of the opiate family, usually found with paracetamol in preparations such as Capadex.
I find that Chai makes me we three times in 25 minutes. The bladder scares me with its predictability - but it would probably scare me more if it wasn't!

PTR said...

Ha, thanks for the correction. I was so sure you were wrong, which makes no sense because you speak with the voice of reason whereas I speak with the voice of a small gibbon. Now I'm wondering which one the doctor actually said to me...