Skip to main content

Sicky sucky.

I hate being sick more than just about anything I can imagine. Nothing can match the frustration and furious feverings, nor the lost time and energy.

I love a good excuse to nap as much as anyone, of course, but tossing and turning between coughing fits and flashes of fever & chills is not cool. Then there's that fuzzy headed acheyness when your cranium gets all full up on phlegm and mucous. That soggy brained feeling mixed with a dull, ceaseless pain. Don't get me started on how much I hate snot in any form--a hatred conditioned over many years of terrible allergies. But let's not forget that infuriating uselessness--between losing the ability to form contiguous (nevermind cohesive) thoughts to the leaden ache in every joint and limb...how are you supposed get anything done like that??

But of course that's just it. Everyone stops expecting you to be a productive member of society when you're sick. Which you'd think would be some kind of blessing except that somehow not having any choice in the matter kills any pleasure one could have taken in the free pass.

As you may have guessed by now, I was sick this weekend. It killed any chance of going out clubbing with my friends Saturday or seeing Vertigo in 70-fucking-mm at the AFI Silver. That's one of my all time favorite films and here it was going to be played all mega-screened at one of my favorite theaters but--no.

You're sick. So that's a no.

Mind you, I've been much, much sicker in my time. Sicker, I imagine, than some people will ever experience. More flippantly, I recall that weekend death-flu--the worst flu I can remember collapsed into a single weekend: huddled up on the couch shivering and delirious and babbling and utterly dissociated from and confused by the tennis match on tv. More seriously, I recall having Lyme disease in high school--I was lucky enough to reach stage 2 and require an IV line be inserted in my arm for a month of puking and shuddering frustrated summer-time lameness. More mysteriously, I remember that still unnamed mono-clone enigma that tried to take from me, evidently systematically, my beloved liver over a three month period.

But back to the here and now. As far as I'm concerned any form or degree of getting sick is an unwelcome and sloven invasion. There is no dignity in being sick. You're just muddled mass wherever you wind up, dripping and soggy and likely irritable. Any plans you may have had are compromised--any attempt at accomplishing things or managing responsibilities or chores, interrupted.

But all that aside, it just sucks. Plain and simple. It sucks getting sick. Regardless what plans got ruined or undignified lumps you become, it just feels awful and there's nothing you can do about it but suffer & be useless for a while. How's that fair?

Well, now that I'm arguably well again, I need to get on with my day. I'm off to scrub off the fever grime and sweats and face whatever the world came up with in my absence.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Or just tell me what you think.

Other things that might interest you...

On aging, and fear.

To begin with, I’m not sure you’re aware of it, but I’m middle aged. Oh? What gave it away? Using a blog as my primary literary medium?¹ Hm. But in fact, the APA defines 35 years as the end of “young adulthood.” Yeah. I found out via some shitpost on twitter when I was already 35, so it didn’t sit well with me then either. But my worries about aging began much sooner than that. See, even in my 20s, I feared I’d been wasting my life. I’d struggled with school and life and everything since graduating high school, arguably sooner, and nothing seemed to be going anywhere meaningful . I felt I had a limited social life, a dead-end job, no money, no great travels, a limping love life; I was, generally, a loser, wasting away... There were none of the usual hallmarks of success or happiness. And that scared me. Would my life have been worth it if I continued in this direction? Would it have been a “life well lived” by the end? So, this is my existential struggle. Even now, as I lurch ever nea...
Post a Comment
Read more

Changing lanes.

I was driving home in some traffic last night when I drifted, in my mind, a long way back (about 20 years) to high school. I was caught in one of those periodic traffic slowdowns as I floated back; you know, those waves of congestion that seem to pass backward through the columns of cars in each lane. (I've heard they start because someone switches lanes, and in response, a rippling emergent slowness travels backward and outward as the cars behind it accommodate the change, one by one.) What drew me back to those younger days was that, back in high school, similar phenomena of congestion took place in the halls between classes, when eddies of young humans would get caught in and around those clumps of those chatting by lockers or retrieving books. Occasionally, backups would occur when groups of people got caught in these eddies, or collided with other groups by the lockers, and slowdowns would ripple back from there. Maybe it's not exactly the same, but as I drove it seemed si...
Post a Comment
Read more

Oatmeal is tasty.

{slurps up berry-oatmeal-deliciousness} Indeed. I need to work on rebuilding a morning schedule. I can be zombie-like enough that I'll waste a perfectly good morning, and have often slept through many. And, really, it's such a useful time of day.
4 comments
Read more