more slowly than usual

Today I've had terrible cramps. They started while I was doing laundry down the street and they haven't subsided, despite the handful of Ibuprofen I took hours ago. They make me tired, make me sort of sink into myself, make me stare ahead, unfocused, daydreaming about nothing tangible.

I was sitting here earlier, trying to write, unable to concentrate, when Dreadlock walked by outside. My door was open and I looked up and there she was. She confessed last week that she walked by my house once and looked in the window because my car wasn't there. "Your place is looking pretty messy," she said. "What's going on?"

"What's going on," I said, "is: don't ever look in my windows again, you lunatic." Who goes around looking in their friends' windows? That's just creepy. But I think Dreadlock just doesn't know any better. She also doesn't know that I hate to be dropped in on, I especially hated it in my crampy, spaced-out state, but I invited her in anyway (after letting her stand in the doorway a few minutes while I pet her dog who stank but was sweet anyway).

Dreadlock and I chatted awhile and I probably seemed like someone heavilly medicated. Slow and wispy. Then she left and I dragged myself outside to sit on my top step in the sun with a book. The landpeople were home, in the living room right above my seat, basically. The infant was crying and crying and the dad was trying to get the two-year-old to put on his sandals for a walk. I could hear them like they were next to me -- they practically *were* next to me, though I couldn't see them. I heard the dad speaking in low tones to the mom, occasionally stopping to remind the toddler to keep putting on his sandals. The baby was squalling, squalling, but what can you do? What can they do? It sounded so miserable, all of it, and also sweet in the middle of the miserableness.

I'm so glad I don't have kids.