crickets and Iago

In the dissection of your classic Shakespearean characters, everybody falls under one of the four humors. In medieval times, it was believed that everyone was ruled by the balance of their 4 basic elemental fluids, and everyone inevitably had a surplus of one. If you’re not familiar: blood meant you were sanguine, tending to be amorous, happy, and generous; yellow bile meant you were choleric, violent and vengeful; phlegm meant you were phlegmatic – dull, pale and cowardly; black bile found you to be melancholic, sentimental, lazy and gluttonous.

The reason why I bring this up at all is I have been revisiting the work of some of the renaissance poets lately. Maybe it's just the language, but it reminds me of Shakespeare with all of its love and envy, and suddenly I'm back waiting in the wings listening for Iago to whisper to Othello to beware jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on, and mock the meat it does. I told a friend of mine today that lately jealousy gnaws at my intestines and then moves on to my stomach. It saves my brain to play with until right before I fall asleep, and then it eats away at that, too.

I am not normally a jealous person, so I find this troubling. Jealousy kinda goes against everything I believe in. That being said - where there is usually blood, lately there is bile. I find myself with nothing nice to say at the moment so I shall say nothing, as my mother taught me. You might think you just hear crickets, but if you're real quiet, you can probably hear my internal house being pillaged. I can exercise, I can eat right, I can even focus my love elsewhere, but there is no known extermination for these things that hide under the bed and go bump in the night. All I can do is practice my patience, maybe get back into a kickboxing class and wait for the beast to get bored and get the hell out.