limegreen
Woke up yesterday morning with a terrible sore throat, which only got worse as the day went on. And some lovely other symptoms have added themselves too, such as a slight fever (just 100.2°F, no big deal and no Foreigner song) that makes my surroundings look all wavy like I am standing on the other side of the barbecue grill, and someone's dad is yelling WHO WANTS CHEESE? and everything smells like bug spray. Only subtract the cheesedad and the bug spray and just keep the waviness. My little fever is also making the world look fake—if I poked this scenery it would fall down. And there is some snottiness. So I guess this Mimi is officially Sick, and while it is tempting to ascribe the sickness to some sort of hoodoo voodoo like “I slept with the window cracked for the first time this year” or “the El is a sewer swamp of germy germs and I need to start taking a helicopter to work,” my logical brain knows that this is a plain old boring virus and not something cool like whooping cough or monkeypox, and that I should be better soon.
Also, shout-out to Walgreens-brand No-Aspirin Flu Gelcaps: you suck. Seriously, your mama's so poor, and fat, and ugly, and stupid, that she tried to put some onion rings on layaway, and then the waiter said “duh, you can't put onion rings on layaway, and by the way you are ugly.” (Boy, that really fell apart. Let me check the side effects profile on the box again.) This cold-and-flu stuff, despite being billed as a nighttime formula, caused some weird idiosyncratic bedtime reaction in me and made my mind race weirdly, and caused me to give up any hopes of having a decent, immune-system-restoring good night's sleep. I finally just got up at midnight to type and play online mahjongg, since my unsleeping restless legs and sniffles, not to mention the way that I kept flipping my twitchy body from back to front to back to front like an anxious pancake, was probably not fair to LT.
I really am not sick all that often (last cold I had was early January), although it may seem like I am a delicate fragile flower, the pale wan Victorian heroine who is too good for this world, because when I am sick I tend to write about it in ridiculous, numbing detail. You may want to go read the Journals Of The Well until this is over.
I GOTS LINK FEVER
Ambergris. Educate yourself about whale secretions.
I don't really know what this is (do you?), but nonetheless the page provided whole minutes of entertainment to my feverish brain.
FLASHBACK
I had a very terrible bus ride home (after I left work one lousy hour early and got passive-aggressive SHIT about doing so, via e-mail! Hello, Office Culture? Yeah, the Clue Desk is on line one for you. Sure, I will just hang around touching everything and get the whole damn office sick, is that okay? Great!)
a. On the bus was my least favorite crazy person, the guy who screams often and with no warning and pounds on the bus window with his fist.
b. On the bus it felt like the air conditioning and the heat were on simultaneously, although that might have been my own personal fever-related problem.
c. On the bus was a weird smell, like a fire in a candy factory.
d. On the bus I had to witness this slack-jawed woman SHAKE and PINCH her toddler awake, saying, “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up now!” for god knows what reason, I guess so that she wouldn't have to exert her lazy ass to carry this extremely small child off the bus.
I feel sorry for all children, and not just the ones who are pinched and shook for doing something age-appropriate like falling asleep on the bus. I would never say I had an unhappy childhood, because I had nothing to be unhappy about, but I was unhappy just plain being a kid, and I never looked forward to the next grade or birthday or going to high school or college. (Although in retrospect I should have been looking forward to college, because I ended up very much enjoying the bastion of pseudo-adulthood it is. Like playing with the other kids in a big, safe, intellectual sandbox. With liquor.) I just wanted the child-ness and the powerlessness to be over with now. I wanted to be an adult. Being an adult is exponentially preferable to being a kid. So now I have this weird intense empathy for babies and children and teenagers. Even when I witness them in public being horrible, I just want to telepathically say, “I know. This sucks. I'm sorry you have to be a kid. I'm sorry that TV talks down to you and no one understands and everything you need is stored on high shelves. Just try and wait it out.”
—mimi smartypants spilled the beans.