A tad miserable

I have managed, for now, to talk myself out of smearing hand lotion all over toilet paper. Mainly by dragging my near-delirious self out of bed and (miraculously) finding a thermometer and verifying that I do have a fever.

At a touch over 101 it’s not high enough to text my sister-doctor to see if she calls 911 for me (because I’d never call 911 myself. I’d be dead before I’d willingly go to an emergency room with a migraine or a bad cold.)

But my temp is high enough to convince myself that I should not be doing anything more risky or unusual than posting a semi-incoherent blog post. No lotion-toilet-paper experiments.

I did finally leave work at noon. I shouldn’t have been there for the last two days, but what the hell. And since arriving home, I have successfully resisted chiming in as the work emails come in on my phone, leaving my team to deal with them as they will.

I have managed to struggle through one magazine these past 6 hours since I’ve come home, although I doubt I’ll retain any of what I read. I tried to find a light book to read, but I have none.

I’m actually surprised I have any books at all that I haven’t read, because there was a time in my life when I only owned books I had already read. But now I have a few unread books. Mostly thick, hardcover books set in obscure foreign countries.

I have one about Solzhenitsyn. And no, of course I didn’t actually know how to spell that; I seem to retain enough thought power to google the spelling of Solzhenitsyn, but not enough thought power to read such a book. Nor am I up to reading the one that’s half in Spanish. Nor the one set in Istanbul. Turns out I have at least two unread books set in Istanbul. Why is that? Nor the one about the women Muslim resistance in Africa. Then there’s Osaka immediately before WWII. That’d be a light read.

I’m blaming the fact that I read “highbrow” magazines. My advice is to myself is: if you insist on reading that kind of magazine, don’t read the literature reviews. Because the only time I ever have time to read a book is when I have a migraine, or a fever of 101, at which point, I need a dumb book. Not a well-reviewed book.

If you haven’t figured it out already, the lotion-on-toilet-paper musing came up because I have, several hours ago, run out of my preferred tissue “with lotion” and my nose is rubbed raw. There is a grocery store quite close by, but I’m currently likely to enjoy a grocery store trip about as much as I would a trip to the ER. So that’s not happening.

Anyway, if I left the house, the first person who saw me would probably call 911, possibly for my sake, but also possibly for their own. The attack of the aging reddish-blond zombie women.

It’s been a rough fucking month. I haven’t been this sick in a long time. It started on New Years Day, with the worst migraine in forever, with John stuck out in Placitas, so I just holed up alone in my room with ice on the inside of the windows and waited it out for 2 days.

Then a bad cold starting on our trip to Tucson, with a migraine kicking in about the time I got back, leading to two days missed work in a row. I never miss that much work.

It’s not that I’m all that stoic, but I have migraines all the time. I can’t miss work just because I don’t feel good, or I’d be unemployable. So I usually stay at work until the point where I’m in danger of doing stupid shit, or sounding drunk, and then I go home and don’t let myself reply to emails.

I suppose I should learn how to watch TV. But I don’t know what to watch, or even how to turn it on. I believe you can also watch TV on laptops, but I don’t know how to do that either. John wrote me instructions for the TV in the living room, but I’ve never attempted to turn it on by myself.

You think I exaggerate. One year, many years ago, when John was (as usual) on a week-long business trip, I attempted to turn on the olympics. I literally could not figure out how to make the olympics show up on my TV. I ended up at the neighbor’s house watching with them, but their frigid central air conditioning (and similarly frigid attitude) soon drove me home.

I’m aware that our Tweeter-In-Chief plans to deliver a speech half an hour from now. But I am already miserable enough; I do not need to listen to someone who is clearly stupider than I am, regardless of my inability to figure out how to work the TV, and even with a 101 degree fever. Someone should configure his TV so he can’t figure out how to turn it on. This could potentially save the world.

Anyway, I could probably figure out how to make the speech come in on my computer. But maybe I’ll just read that book about Osaka in WWII instead. May we not soon be there.