Sicko

I caught a cold this past week, which was not a raucously awesome time. I didn’t get sick last winter, though, so this year I was pretty much doomed. It’s like hitting too many green lights in a row: You can only cheat the system for so long before getting stuck behind a bus for five cycles at the same intersection.

Actually, I’ve grown so used to getting a head cold for Christmas that the first warm rivulet of post-nasal drip oozed with the nostalgia of holiday tradition.

The saving grace was that my job offers not only sick days, but also the special bonus of actually wanting me to use them instead of coming to the office to spew contagion like a germ land mine.

This culture of not infecting others (Ha! Culture!) is taking some getting used to. In college I would just snargle my way through classes and into a puddle of pitiful, late-night studying and nose-blowing. During fall-semester finals of my senior year, I eventually followed the combination of an overflowing waste basket and NyQuil-induced forlornness to its natural conclusion:

In twenty-five years of phlegm experience, though, I’ve only ever lost my voice once—naturally, at the least convenient time possible. I’ve already mentioned my abortive stint as a 1st-grade teacher with Teach For America, which put me in front of a roomful of six-year-olds over whom I had effectively no control even when I could shout.

The day I started to lose my voice, I stubbornly decided not to need a substitute. I tried to encourage the class to keep their volume down so that I wouldn’t have to overtax my vocal chords, and since my go-to tactic is “THREATEN WITH RIDICULOUS THINGS,” that’s what I did.

In the end, I did have to take a couple of days off. I left some helpful notes for the sub, though.

Weirdly, when I got back to school, the students turned out to be better behaved than usual until my voice came back. They were oddly accepting of games like, “OK class, we’ll be learning about even numbers in Impossibly High Squeaky Voice today.” Maybe I was right about the substitute in the first place.

A helpful friend made sure to preserve my dulcet tones for generations yet unborn. This video features me attempting to sing our class song—music by Woody Guthrie, lyrics by me, and hand motions/frantic jumping by Miss Boling’s Class.

ARE YOU READY TO LEARN NOW?

I Am the Internet's Leading Expert on Voldemort Syphilis

If you pay an inordinate amount of attention to my sidebar, you may have noticed that I enabled ads on this site. I’m pretty sure this does not count as “selling out,” because I think you actually have to make any money to do that.

Mostly I was interested to see what ads Google would deem appropriate for my content. So far it’s been pretty disappointing—a little coffee, a lot of exterminators, and some totally legit online psychology classes. Then again, I guess ice cream isn’t a major player in the online marketplace.

Much more satisfying is my StatCounter account, which tracks my site visits and gives me the tools I need to become a creepy cyber-stalker. My favorite feature is Keyword Analysis, which lets me see what search terms have led people to this blog.

On the one hand, it’s exciting that people actually find me via search engines. On the other hand, I’m a little concerned about some of the phrases that lead to me.

In the above case, it’s not really the phrase that worries me so much as the URGENCY expressed. The next one, meanwhile, is less disturbing and more pitiful:

This keyword feature let me discover that I am the go-to source for information on He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named’s unsafe sex practices.

That’s right: Google “voldemort syphilis,” and my page comes up as the first result. Now I can rest assured that I’ve made a meaningful contribution to society.

While you’re at it, I’m also uniquely qualified to answer your questions on canned pasta impurities and the odds of making it through the night undigested.

Apparently I can provide expertise for other Dark Lord-related needs as well, though other sites have beaten me to the top slot.

Feel free to call on me for snot questions, too.

Then we have the topics where I’m glad that someone else has been selected champion.

These results are also the reason behind my incriminating Google search history for this evening, left over from trying to find out if I’m the top match. You all are my witnesses for when Big Brother stops by with a few questions about my surfing habits.

P.S. It appears that a good third of my search engine traffic comes from people who are promptly disappointed that I’m not providing an encyclopedic My Little Pony database, and another 40% is from the time I titled a post with an insanely popular Charlie Sheen quotation. I didn’t piggyback off of Charlie’s tailspin on purpose, but if I do sell out in the future, this is the form it will take.

The Eyeball Adventure, or Another Reason to Hate Wal-Mart

There’s a tree outside my bedroom window.

Actually, for most of the winter “outside” hasn’t been the most accurate description. High winds last fall shredded my window screen, and since then I’ve been getting better acquainted with the nearby nature.

Last week, however, I finally accepted that it is okay to ask Maintenance to fix things sometimes, and now I have new screens. I think the tree misses our friendship, though, because it keeps trying to reestablish contact. For the last several nights, I’ve been discovering a fine spray of purple leaf litter blown across my pillow and down between the sheets.

I can’t find the hole, though, and I like keeping the window cracked, so every time I just go to bed and trust my arboreal companion not to shed at me too much. I guess that means it’s my fault that I woke up this morning with an entire branch inside my left eyeball.

I pawed at my scorching cornea until I had a really good cryface going.

Then I appealed to my roommates for eye drops, but none were to be found. I even fashioned an eyecup from a foam egg carton and tried to wash the interloper out, but all I got was water down my shirt to match the mucus all over my face.

The roommates left for work while visions of permanent optical scarring danced in my head.

Luckily, my parents live in the same town and are really good at answering distress calls. I called home and, while I worked on scaling down my panic enough to put on shoes, my mom drove up in her Minivan of Mercy.

She took me to the nearest optometrist, where we met the person I have chosen to blame for all my suffering.

It turns out that Wal-Mart’s optical department doesn’t open until 9:00. We decided to wait, since it was already about 8:30, and I did a pretty good job of not looking at stuff or dripping snot on anything.

Finally the receptionist who sells you miniature screwdrivers and clip-on sunglasses arrived. I didn’t check her heart rate or anything, but I’m pretty sure she was both present and conscious for the following conversation:

Let’s fast-forward fifteen minutes. Fifteen looong, bench-huddling, waiting room minutes. I could see a little better, but blinking still stung and I was anxious to make it to work instead of burning up my leave hours in Wal-Mart. Keep in mind that, at this point, my mother and I had been sitting ten feet from the receptionist, discussing eyeballs, for a quarter of an hour.

Possible reactions to this news:

Polite Response (suitable for nuns, Peace Corps volunteers, and other people who are legitimately as nice as I like to imagine myself)

Reasonable Response Under the Circumstances (suitable for someone who has been waiting an hour for an emergency visit to this weekend-loving doctor)

Actual Response (neither suitable nor effective)

The good thing about unanticipated public bawling is that it’s pretty useful against massive flakes of tree dander. By the time we got back to my mom’s car I had washed away both the leaf and my dignity, and I was ready to go to work and pretend that my face looked like that because of allergies.

The day turned out all right after that, though. This success is mostly thanks to my mother, who, as she took me back to my apartment, discovered a stash of leftover Valentines chocolate in the car console.

We can learn three lessons from this story, as follows:

1. Leaves are not as innocent as they seem.
2. Some people really suck at their jobs.
3. Moms can fix a lot of stuff, especially when they augment their powers with chocolate.

Do Not Chop Me With An Axe!

My 7th grade English teacher insisted that we skip lines when we wrote on notebook paper. I was unreasonably incompetent at this.

The rule made sense for someone who has to decipher student handwriting all day, but all the wasted space caused me physical pain. I think she even made us use only one side of the paper, and with every blank sheet I shed the sap-sticky tears of endangered forests. I even wrote her a melodramatic poem about the tragedy:

I came by this resource obsession naturally. Both of my parents spent years in the conservation-oriented National Park Service, and the combined forces of nature and nurture stopped just shy of turning me into a compulsive hoarder.

Shortly after I was born, my mother made an agreement with God that, if she could only use disposable diapers with a clear conscience, she would recycle everything else she ever laid hands on. So far she has kept her word to the tune of several tons of plastic and aluminum, every item of clothing discarded in the household, and at least one entire toilet.

The impact on my personality showed early. My elementary teachers repeatedly caught me rescuing inch-long pencils from the trash can and integrating toilet paper rolls into my art projects.

I also picked up a habit of reenacting the Sesame Street sketch with Frank the Water Conservation Fish. It’s still hard to breathe when I watch that animated water gushing down the drain.

I keep coming back to paper, though, because it seems to be thrown away with more gusto than other recyclables. I, meanwhile, can get three or four birthdays out of a single piece of giftwrap.

I’ve also been known to tear Kleenex in half when the immediate mucus incident did not merit a full sheet. Then again, that’s probably more because I’m cheap.

I pay my credit card bills online, but the bank keeps sending me paper statements and return envelopes anyway. Like the proverbial Native American using every part of the buffalo, I file the statements, keep the outer envelopes in a drawer for grocery lists, and squirrel away the return envelopes against the coming apocalypse. Last month I realized that once the world ends I won’t need to send letters, so I took a stack to the bank for reuse. The teller said, “I’m sure we’ll find something to do with them” in the same way that your 2nd grade teacher says, “Our class gerbil went to live on a farm after spring break.”

My current crusade is the office, where we toss or shred truckloads of stuff that is still, by my standards, perfectly useful. You say this letter is going to National Headquarters? That’s no reason not to print it on the back of last week’s pizza flier.

Since we’re a nonprofit and always scrounging for money, I’ve tried using the financial angle.

Me: You know how pay raises have been frozen for years?

Coworker: Yeah.

Me: That’s because you keep printing out your emails.

Then I opted for the Merciless Enforcer, but that was problematic.

Me: DON’T THROW THAT OUT OR I’LL SPIT IN YOUR COFFEE Oh hi, Boss, wasn’t that a fun joke hahaha but seriously put it in the recycle tray I mean it only don’t fire me please.

Now I’ve enlisted some coniferous help for an emotional blackmail campaign in my signage.

If this doesn’t work, I’m going back to Frank the Fish.

(P.S. Yes, we used the movie UHF to study the Hero Journey archetype in English class. This experience probably explains a lot about my worldview.)

The Buckle

We went to some church event in my early childhood where the more responsible teenagers watched the little kids so the adults could finally have some peace. The kindergarten room was pretty quiet because Meg and Vlad, the teenagers in charge, had a really large bucket of markers and a lot of construction paper.

Sedentary art projects are a good idea for mass child care. A less good idea is a healthy game of “Let’s All Call Vlad Names.”

I don’t know how this activity got started, or how it got approved, but none of us had ever played a funnier game.

We were all five- and six-year-olds sitting in a church, and it didn’t even occur to us to use Bad Words. I’m not sure I even knew any. We got creative instead.

I needed something really hilarious to keep up. I scoured the room for inspiration. After a couple of minutes we had used up pretty much everything on the table, all the furniture, and most of Vlad’s clothes. But no one had mentioned his belt! That comedic goldmine was all for me, and I announced triumphantly:

I had no time to enjoy my success. Before my first victorious “HA,” Meg yanked me out of the chair by my shirt and marched me into the next room.

It was dark, I was completely bewildered, and no one thought I was funny anymore. I was all set to cry even before it turned out I was in trouble.

Meg was very, very mad all of a sudden, and I had just remembered that this room had the haunted house in it last Halloween, and also weren’t there dead ghosts in the basement and could they get in here? And now she was yelling at me, too.

That’s when the real crying started.

I couldn’t even defend my innocence because my eyes and mouth were too full of liquid injustice. No matter how much I shook my head and wailed, I remained wrongly accused. It got even worse when she made me go back in and apologize to Vlad.

Meg was a really big buckle.

The Bleh Threshold

I recently crossed the Bleh Threshold again, thus eliminating another lunch option.

The Bleh Threshold is the point at which some delightful item or experience suddenly becomes loathsome due to overexposure. I reach this point pretty often with food, due to my extremely lazy cooking habits. When I discover a dish that is both delicious and convenient, I will happily eat it for ten meals in a row until I never want to see it again.

That’s what happened with baked pumpkin. Thanks to Halloween, I acquired several pounds of jack-o-lantern leftovers and cooked it all into fragrant, chemical-spill-orange mush.

Since I grew up eating a lot of baked squash, my pile of pumpkin-and-butter-filled Tupperware promised delectable lunches and dinners for most of the week. I was equally thrilled about the food and about the chance to feel cool by eating something my coworkers thought was weird.

My first jack-o-lunch was like a mouthful of magical unicorn sunshine. I spent the afternoon dreaming about eating it for supper, and the gold-plated laughter of kittens and bunnies did not disappoint. Tuesday repeated all of Monday’s glory, if not more.

Three bites in to Wednesday’s serving of concentrated enchantment, I abruptly realized that this was the most disgusting food I had ever tried to swallow. If rubber cement and boogers had ugly children, they would beat this stuff instantly. And I had another quart at home.

I should know better by now. Childhood experience with the Bleh Threshold has already driven me away from Pop-Tarts, frozen chicken fried rice, butterscotch pudding, Teriyaki Chicken Bowl carry-out, Orange Crush, and some creamy casserole with a lot of black pepper, all of which are delicious three times a month and vomitous three times a week. Apparently the whole “too much of a good thing” idea is for real, despite protests from the internal four-year-old in charge of my self-control.

This distressing phenomenon isn’t limited to food. With computer games, the Bleh Threshold usually hits as soon as I am legitimately sick and have nothing else to do. With clothes, I tend to reach the BT upon finally seeing a picture of myself and realizing how my favorite sweater appears to the outside world.

With music, the process is drawn out and always tragically self-inflicted:

Anybody want some pumpkin?

EXTRA CREDIT: Hit Repeat and join the cycle!