8/25/06
It's never as simple as just one thing..
My tiredness and irritibility, my strong, completely unreasonable, and rebellious desire NOT to eat the bowl of pineapple chunks or drink the paper coffee cup of water she urged me to take, that nagging, misplaced sense of guilt and duty that made me eat and drink anyway and resent her with every bite. The poking and prodding and slow questions in Chinese that I could barely understand. My typical annoyance at myself for my incompetence in showing the proper ratio of politeness to shame to small talk. Some hidden psychological complications we won't go into now. And the slow, methodical way she would inflict intense pain on tiny points of my body and say reassuringly, "If it hurts then it is working."
All of that together made me feel so...SAD. And sorry for myself. So I started crying. Sweet old lady sticking needles in my knees and I’m blubbling and my nose is running but my arms are needled-up too and I can’t move. They all probably think I’m just a baby with an extremely low threshold for pain.