What a completely wretched day.
Yesterday, I mean. Today is off to a more or less brilliant start and seems like it'll carry on that way. But yesterday was infested with so many cancerous elements - fatigue, envy, loneliness, exhaustion, and...is there a world for a feeling that the world is all moving one direction, in one lane of traffic, and after hours of unwittingly moving against it and getting dirty looks, someone grabs you by the shoulder and says, 'Hey buddy, you're supposed to be going the other way,' and so you turn and move with the crowd, but after some time has passed you find that once again you're colliding with traffic and getting dirty looks until someone grabs you by the shoulder and says, 'Hey buddy, you're supposed to be going the other way,' and so on to madness?
That feeling festered all day and culminated during my search for a thermometer, which led me in crooked spiral around eight or nine city blocks and into one drug store, one blood center, three different floors of the same hospital, and two pharmacies, the last of which sold me a thermometer for $9.79 and sent me on my way.
With the combined H1N1 hysteria, a public workplace, and my very visible symptoms, it seemed not only prudent but a civic responsibility to check for a fever. Just to be sure, you know, and possibly have an excuse to go home and lie down immediately. Though I was pretty sure I didn't have a fever, at least not on a major-network scale, just the kind that might manifest itself if a long, miserable day began to turn into a long, miserable night. And I bet I looked long and a miserable. I felt long and miserable. It was clear that no one particularly wanted to be near me, or hear anything I had to say, or even have me listen to anything they had to say except, "You know, you shouldn't be touching anything that the patrons might. Including the cookie display."
My co-worker shadowed me the entire night with a small grimace and a tube of disinfectant wipes and it didn't take long to get the hint - I am wanted nowhere but far, far away in quarantine. My fever never clocked over 100.2 F, but I was sneezing, dripping, coughing, and generally looking and feeling like hell, and with the prospect of staying late to help move incredibly heavy objects and return six hours later for a Christian college graduation ceremony, I graciously - swiftly - accepted the offer to leave work right then at 9:30pm and, thanks, not worry about coming in the next morning for the ceremony lest my superior carry home my unidentified disease to his infant daughter. Still I kind of felt treated like an ant detected of cordyceps infection.
But 98.6 F this morning. And some mild snot. Oddly, the general will to live seemed unaffected by both the onset of illness and the subsequent recovery to good health, hovering throughout at a steady 'This Too Shall Absurdly Pass'. And so it mostly has. Now on to the other stuff.
