maybe this will help you with your headaches?

There's this woman here whom I love––she's so cheery and wants to reach out to people and uplift them––she seems to have severe alzheimer's but through this I get glimpses of the colorful life she's had. One of her shticks is to tell kids they'll be bored in first grade. She can see they're energetic, creative, and intelligent and so she believes they'll be bored in first grade and lately I've begun to wonder if that isn't incredibly true.

The first week of first grade I started having migraines 24/7, eventually after months or maybe a year or so? I was prescribed some daily pill and this ended the 24/7, though not the migraines. They're supposed to be juvenile migraines and I'm supposed to outgrow them and I kind of have. They don't happen as severely as often but nothing makes them go away. No OTC pain killers, no prescribed nasal sprays, no peppermint oil, no ice packs, no caffeinated beverages. Some things make my headaches manageable but the only thing to do with a migraine is to lay in a very quiet, very dark room and hope to fall asleep quickly. Once I had an intense back massage that made a migraine go away, the kind of massage that leaves you feeling bruised and battered for days afterward.

Except.

This past year by forcing myself to go to old ladies choir despite the pain I discovered that learning to sing a song in German started to make the pain go away. And so I've been experimenting. Reading Jorge Luis Borges poems in Spanish and then in English and then in Spanish again: this helps! Taking a three hour nap then reading e e cummings and drinking copious amounts of powerade while sitting on my bed with the early evening sun shining through my window MAKES THE MIGRAINE AND NAUSEA GO AWAY!

And today? Drinking more copious amounts of powerade and reading Sherlock Holmes The Redheaded League out loud to my my mom made it all go away.

Goodbye, migraine.

DO YOU UNDERSTAND?

If I can force my brain to be thoroughly engaged and interested or challenged and thoroughly hydrate/flush-out my system - the headaches, the migraines, the nausea all go away. I'm sure this has to happen before I'm completely migrainely debilitated, but!

But maybe she's right and we were all just bored in first grade. It's the first argument I've heard that has swayed me in my staunch support of and loyalty to public education.