I’m sick at the moment, and it sucks. And I don’t mean my typical, “holy cripes that dude needs to be committed because he’s more wrong in the head than Robin Williams” sick, or the occasional, “OMG, that did you see that guy break his arm while attempting that 1280 Double Nooner with a front flip off the roof of that building that it’s, like, sticking out in six places?” Also, no, I’m not referring to being sick (as in tired) of the misleading rhetoric around here (I leave and work in Southwestern Ohio, btw) that’s thicker Chunky Soup Clam Chowdah.
No, no, I’m actually physically ill. Under the weather. Feelin’ puny. I haz a cold.
This one has been quite a doozy, too. It was bad enough on Sunday that I was getting all tired and disoriented from walking up the stairs. Admittedly, the probably doesn’t sound that bad, but just four days ago, I was heralding the fact that I’d run 3+ miles and felt pretty good about it. The stairs shouldn’t really be posing much of a problem these days.
Luckily, I’m already kind of feeling better. I mean, I’m sure I have a long way to go before I’m back to being, you know, actually healthy, but at this point I’m only dealing with the remains of my congestion, which is ever so slowly leeching it’s way down to my chest. Which is good and bad, if you ask me. On the one hand, I hate the runny-nose, stuffy head portion of the annual winter cold almost as much as a Bostonian hates the Yankees. And seriously, when I blow my nose, it pretty much sounds like someone is blowing the contents of a cement mixer out through a tuba.
For the record, that’s a bunch of BS if you ask me. When most of normal people I know blow their noses, they manage to do so quite effectively while sounding dainty like a fairy spreading pixie dust on an enchanted garden. But me? Oh, no, my nasal cavities are so screwed up internally, it’s apparently Horton sprays a Who with plaster of Paris.
So, in the interest of no longer being the trumpet-nosed office pariah, I’m usually happy when all the, um, gunk moves south. Unfortunately, though, apparently when it comes to working out, you’re good if it’s above the neck and supposed to take it easy when it’s below the neck.
In other words, if I follow the rules, they’re temporarily gonna put a damper on the running.
The thing that really blows is that although I’m feeling much, much better, today’s election day in the good ole U.S of A, and you can bet your bottom dollar I’ll be doing my civic duty (as I expect you will be, too, right?). Voter turnout is expected to be heavy, which means waiting in lines for my turn at the proverbial ballot box. That also mean that while I wait, I get to be the guy getting the Bolivian Stink Eye from pretty much everybody, because I’m obviously carrying a strain of swine-monkey-potato flu, or whatever that stuff was from Contagion.
Of course, the truth is that I expect to get this stupid cold at least once a year. When you have kids in school, the advent of chilly weather and flu season is pretty much just waiting for the hammer to drop. The fact is that no matter what you do, how often you wash or sanitize, or how thick the plastic you get for your personal living space bubble, sooner or later, your children are going bring home The Plague. And just to spite you for all the hours spent lecturing them about sharing, they are ultimately going to share it with you.
The worst part is that there’s never, ever a good time for it. You don’t have. I certainly don’t have time. In case I haven’t mentioned it enough over the past week, I’m attempting to spew forth 50,000 words of a new novel this month. Spending my Sunday being kind of delirious on the couch and having fever dreams about a pack of wild horses stalking a group of lazy tigers (what is a group of tigers called? Name that zoological term and win fabulous prizes!) doesn’t really get the word count done.
Then again, as it turns out, I wasn’t really delirious, I was just napping on the couch while the Bengals got knocked around by the Broncos. And I managed to get the word count done, anyway. But that’s pretty much what we do these days, right? We can’t really take the time to be sick, rest, and work on getting better. We have stuff to do, and by golly, it’s gotta get done. So we take whatever medicine we can get our hands one (if we’re lucky it’s the good kind you have to register with the FDA to get), we buckle down, and we persevere. Or, as one of my fellow NaNoWriMoers mentioned on Twitter this morning, we Nano-vere.
You know, just once I’d like to be able to take a day and remember what it’s like to be sick like when we were kids. I want to stay huddled in bed, subsisting on little more than soup and ginger ale, and not feel guilty about it. So mark my words: the next time The Plague strikes, I’m keeping my jamas on and having a Netflix Walking Dead marathon or something.
Just as long as, well, it’s not NaNo month. That train wants for no plague.
No, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go find a tissue.
Pud’n
Puddintopia 
