Sick...

  Once more, I find myself sitting at this laptop sick... a cold this time. Thankfully, not flu. Just under the weather, drippy nose, sore throat, uproareous sneezing and a general malaise of fatigue and giddiness brought on by a mix of over the counter meds and constant and unrelenting anxiety.

 I've been wondering what I do or don't do that seems to constantly bring on these spates of illness. In the not too distant past, I've spent considerable amounts of cash (to me, I realise considerable is a relative term) on vitamin/mineral supplements of the gummy, one a day, women's health specific and antioxidant variety. A plethora of medicaments promising to eradicate fatigue, boost my immune system, my metabolism, and give me a shiner coat hair and skin. I admit I've been a sucker for every TV shill that promised to somehow change my life the better living through chemistry route.

If I really stopped long enough to think about it, I'd be downright angry at the fact that all these things have really given me, is colorful and expensive urine. But I am far too tired to be angry. I'm just flat tired, worn out with a slipping down kind of life.

Once, many years ago, I think I was about seven or eight or so, I got a rare and lingering cold with a cough that wouldn't go away. I say rare because I can count on the fingers of my left hand how many times I was sick in my childhood.  We just weren't. My parents expressed a broad contempt of the children in our neighbourhood who lived on Dimetapp and made constant visits to the doctor. We seemed to boast in our household how we 'never went to the doctor' as if it were some badge of honor. But that one time, I had a cough serious enough to warrant a rare trip to the doctor. It was exciting. I got a note to be picked up by my mother from school. A normally unthinkable thing..leaving school before the day was over. And it just got better from there, after the visit from the doctor, and a stop at Eckerd Drugs for a glass(!!) bottle of cough syrup that tasted like cherry and a bottle of the Pepto-Bismol pink antibotic that tasted like bubble gum, my mother made a totally out of character decision and instead of going back to school, we stopped off at a Showbiz Pizza (like Chuck E Cheese in the 80's) and I was allowed to have pizza and play some video games in the arcade.

I've always wondered in later years if it wasn't that break from the norm that really caused the cough to subside, more than the antibotics or the cough syrup (although being laced with codeine never hurts!) That maybe I just needed a break, some TLC, some one on one time with a parent having fun.

And now as my 38 year old self, I often wonder if my illnesses aren't my body forcing me to take a break. Maybe it's saying I need to eat pizza and play video games a little more instead of the flat out work that seems to be the tempo of my life.

The problem is that I am always subject to severe guilt about any appearance of 'shirking'. Even now as I sit here in my bed with a bedside table full of the over-the-counter medicaments my parents have such contempt for, I am trying to race the clock, trying to get better quickly because I am feeling such guilt at not being at my desk at Non-Company-I-Work-For-But-Am-Not-Really-One-Of-Them. Not being there for them to yell over to me, 'Schedule a Meeting for us in the Apex Conference Room', worrying about the 80-90+ emails or more that are just mounting up in my inboxes, my monthly reports that are unfinished and on and on it goes.

Non-Company itself is part of the problem. I guess it's having nothing to look forward to, except weeks and weeks of monotonous routine. The same spate of problems, following endless intractible, yet mostly meaningless procedures. The labyrinth of office politics. Never having a day of vacation, a day off, unless I am sick and that is unpaid.

I guess on a day like this, I would give anything for my Mom to show up with a get-out-of-work note and a trip to the arcade for some video games and pizza.