Robert Manners

Flu Baffle

God, I feel miserable... but I can't decide if I'm miserable enough to miss work. I mean, I'm not puking or crapping or shivering or dripping from the nose, I just feel achy and tired and queasy. I feel as if my head weighed twice it's usual heft, and I'm a little dizzy. The idea of putting on pants presents itself as a gargantuan undertaking, much less schlepping down to the car and wrestling through traffic to the office. What I'm trying to figure out, though, is whether or not I'm contagious, whether or not there's anything that I need to do today at the office, and whether or not staying in bed will be any help at all. No Yes No? Yes No Maybe? I can't quite make up my mind. And besides, I still have to put on pants and get in the car, regardless, because I'm out of ibuprofen. And if I skip work today, I'll have more work to do tomorrow, and I have no guarantee I'll feel better tomorrow, either.



Solution: call work (just did that and left a message) to say that I won't be in unless there's something they terribly terribly need for me to do. Go to the store and buy fluids, ibuprofen, and such, then come back here. Stay in bed and force fluids while watching movies and reading, wash this damned bug out of my system on a deluge of ruby grapefruit juice and herb tea while getting enough rest that my muscles can recover from whatever is making them shake. If that doesn't make me well by tomorrow, I will martyr myself with Robitussin and caffeine and go in anyway.



There, now I can just relax and stop worrying about whether or not to go in. I always feel terribly guilty when I take sick-leave, but then I feel even worse if I give my illnesses to others. And considering how little work I got done yesterday, when I felt rather better than I do now, I'm pretty sure it would be a waste of energy. But perhaps when I'm out at the store I can swing by the office and print out the database, and maybe do some of my database work here in bed. Or maybe not. We'll see.



I find myself pondering the strange dreams I had last night during those few hours I actually managed to sleep. We had windstorms last night, with the howling and the scratching against the windows and the drafts whistling through the house, so along with the flu there was a lot to wake me up, and when I am woken up in the night I tend to remember my dreams more clearly... and, when I'm ill or uneasy, those dreams tend to be rather more bizarre than usual. Like the dream involving Amy Sedaris stalking me, disguised as my mother (which doesn't take a great deal of disguising, they are very alike), at my maternal grandmother's former home in the mountains, where I shot her in the crotch with a BB gun to make her go away. Or the dream in which I am taking a yacht cruise with Ab Fab's Patsy and Edina, where Edina's ex-husband brings his new wife, an overweight geisha dressed in an incongrous black crepe de chine kimono and with a bust like Dolly Parton's. Or the dream in which I become embroiled in one of those closed-house reality TV shows, but in a Sims neighborhood populated by the entire casts of movies that I've seen in the last year, notably Polish Wedding with Clare Danes.



As fascinating as I'm sure all of this is, I have to stop writing now. I am intensely hungry, as I have been all week (I can tell from the mirror that I've put on at least five pounds in the last few days), but my instinct is to feed this flu to bursting-point. In closing, here's a little lump of masculine pulchritude, one of my favorite wallpaper images. Ain't he cute?