I’ve had a few friends confide in me that they suffer headaches. I’m glad to hear this. It’s not that I wish anyone pain (except the Road Runner—never have I hated a cartoon character so much, the moronic look, the earsplitting beep-beep, the placidity in the face of extreme odds, the arrogance of a bird that doesn’t even fly[1]), it’s that I’m glad to find others who suffer from headaches. My gladness is a bit on the selfish side: in the silly putty I call my mind, the more people who have headaches, the less likely it is that I have a brain tumor. My reasoning being that brain tumors are relatively rare, and if there are plenty of headaches to go around, then it is unlikely that my headache is a strong indication of a brain tumor. This is good because brain tumors are very bad. They eat away at what makes you the person you thought you were.

[1] According to Wikipedia, the roadrunner, while capable of flight, spends most of its time running along the ground at speeds up to 15 mph.

Brain tumors also provide a strong counterargument to the question of a soul: if your personality (and by extensions the choices you make, which is one of the ways Judaism defines the functions of the soul) are so drastically affected by a breakdown of brain material, perhaps the two and half pounds of brain is who you are after all. The rabbis respond by saying that a person with a disease is not liable for their actions, since their decisions are not their own. God therefore does not judge diseased people. This only gets the rabbis around the ethical problems with judging people who are incapable of controlling their choices. It does not explain why so much of your personality and choices are tied to the proper functioning of your brain. If the soul had that great an influence over a person, then even with the breakdown of the brain, a sick person’s choices would still be soul inspired (which sounds suspiciously like a groovy 70s song). It’s at this point that the rabbis usually stare me down and explain slowly and patiently and using very small words that the soul in an imperfect vessel cannot fulfill its mission on earth (which is to grow closer to God—more on that in my elusive Jewish essay). And that is why it is important to explain that God does not judge sick people, similar to how God does not judge children, as they have not fully developed their ethical senses (which, again, begs the question of why this sense needs to be developed if its innate in the soul—but I digress and pound away).

This week I took four tablets of ibuprofen. Today was the second set of tablets. I say this as a cathartic confession. I have a rule about ibuprofen: four tablets a month. I used to pop ibuprofen daily. Then I learned about rebound headaches. Since I’m a recovering rebound headache-er, I have to be very careful when I take too many pills in a short time. I did sleep in this morning as I woke up in the middle of a heavy snowfall and learned that the van had been cancelled. I drove in to work after two additional hours of sleep (I always wake up tired, and it's not until I leave the Castle that I lose the desperate need to crawl back under the covers, especially when the Doolies is sleeping away). Too much sleep is a trigger for my headaches. At the peek of my headache, at around 4pm, I decided that there was no need to chop my own head off—I should grab some medicine from the handy-dandy corporate medicine cabinet and deal with the consequences. (According to the Chinese herbalist Doolies visits, he can tell a person who takes too many ibuprofens by blackness on their fingertips.)

I’m not sure you can tell, but I’m feeling great—almost P.H.D. great. After finishing this short essay, I’m going to see if I have another doodle in me. Doolies likes my little guy, and I’m going to see what my Wacom tablet has in store for me today.