Death by acute hypochondria

I am not well suited to travel.

Anyone who doubts me on this would only need to have seen me at 7.15 this morning, mewling pitifully to an empty room that I must have had bad sushi last night and was dying, dying, dying. Behaving in such a way is pretty juvenile and, when there’s no-one around, frankly useless. I think I’m just cumulatively under-slept and dehydrated.

Awakened again by 4.30 am garbage collection, lay awake fantasising about writing an angry e-mail to ACT Minister of Tourism. It’s the back of a hotel for god’s sake (alright, and a bunch of restaurants) and they have a glass collection every frikken morning.

Crash! Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle! Crash. Beep-beep-beep. Rumble.

Anyway, lay awake in a fit of insomnia, convinced my brow was feverish while my hands and feet were freezing off. Reconfigured bedding endlessly: too hot with the blanket, too cold with just a sheet. I think I’d just overheated the room when I went out for dinner and should have aired it when I got back. And drunk a lot more water.

I am so staying at my parent’s country retreat tonight, dammit.

So this is why I have not done the globe-trotting backpacker thing yet: I am a fragile sleeper, and a complete hypochondriac when under-slept. Every time I travel for work it just turns into a whinge-fest and/or I get genuinely ill.

Just commit me to the nursing home now …

Anyway, met the lads for dinner last night, and it was good. We went to Shogun for dinner, rather good Japanese. Afterwards we went to the new bar missjenjen and I had wanted to check out – Mortis. (Latin, third declension noun, genitive case, meaning: “of death”. Six years of Latin was good for something.) It has a kind of mortuary theme, other than the window seats: white suede couches and a starlit effect of dangling fibre-optic cable. Everything else, though, has a stainless steel mortician’s slab chic. There are some illuminated ultrasounds and MRIs on light boxes and the toilets continue the functional steel-finish theme.

Not without charm.

Okay, it’s Naylor Day – and my offering sucks. Goddamn computer I’m sharing here won’t transmit more than a few hundred words at a time to blogger, and Explorer often crashes while formatting. It’s awful. So I only got 647 of 1200 words up, and the 12 point spacing between paragraphs is missing at the end of what I could upload. It’s there, but I beg you, look not until later this evening when hopefully I’ll have been able to fix it from my parent’s place.

Even dial-up has to be better than these conditions …