November 18, 2010
Whether I want to or not, it's back to work today.
Still sick.
I sound like I'm talking with tampons shoved up my nose.
My throat hurts.
Coughing, sneezing, general aches and pains.
Is it my overwhelming commitment to my students that is the driving force behind this assinine move?
Nope.
Is it the knowledge that the longer I stay home the further behind we get in class?
Maybe a little.
Is it guilt knowing that Stephen has been in charge of cooking, chauffering, shopping, tending to me (and there is a lot to tend to, believe me!) pet care, etc?
Not even close.
I'm off to work today because sick or not, two days in bed, three days in my pj's is my limit.
If I don't get out of the house now, I many never leave again.
Which is an interesting thought.
Last evening, while lying in bed feeling sorry for myself and having just finished a very good book, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and therefore wondering what I was going to read next, Stephen comes upstairs carrying a book in a plastic bag. . .the kind of bag you'd bring home fruits and veggies in from the grocery store.
I save those bags.
I love it when other people save them, too.
He says he found it in the mailbox.
I knew immediately what the book was, and from whence it came.
And I was very excited.
What a lovely treat for someone who has been stuck in the house since Sunday.
In this bag was a book.
But, not just any book.
This book is the perfect book for me.
It has been vetted by the critics and managed to come out of that scathing process almost whole.
I have several books in my bookshelf that look just like it.
No dust jacket required
Missing cover.
Gnaw and chew marks on the corners and the spine.
And because Frankie immediately recognized a kindred spirit, he leapt onto our bed, which is normally a no-no, but methinks I was too tired to doth protest too much, and gave that bag and book the once over.
At least the bag at first.
He was so concerned about my health and well being, he even tried to unknot the bag on his own.
What a little muffin he is.
And so helpful, too.
I gently eased the knot and bag out of Frankie's mouth, and removed the book from the bag.
He went crazy.
Wild.
Sniffed the book all over. . .front, back, spine, he would have sniffed each page had I not let him know, firmly, that his sniffing for kindred spirits was over.
I hid the bag behind my back, under the covers.
Not to be deterred by something as silly as me hiding the bag, he went on the hunt until his sniffer-cum-GPS located it, and he hauled it out from underneath me.
No mean feat for dog or bag.
He had that look on his face.
The one that says, "I know I'm not supposed to have this, and I don't care. I want it. It's covered in the scent of book chewing kindred spirits and you will not take it from me."
Really.
Hum.
I looked at him and he knew what the look on my face meant.
"Give me that bag before you choke yourself you silly dog."
I won.
But not before sustaining a couple of wounds.
Because Frankie mistook my wanting the bag as a sign that I was interested in a game of tug of war.
Victorious, I put the bag in a place I knew he'd never find it.
Don't ask.
And get your mind out of the gutter.
And don't ask the obvious, which is how come I just didn't get out of bed and put the bag in a drawer, or give it to Stephen to take to the kitchen and introduce to our collections of plastic bags?
Because sick people don't think logically.
They think through their over-the-counter-cold-and-flu-medicated brains.
Case in point:
Last evening, after enjoying a lovely chicken stir fry and quinoa, I had a hankering for some vitamin C.
Actually, I was just feeling bad because there were three grapefruits on the counter waiting for me to enjoy their citrusy goodness, but I hadn't been doing so because cutting the grapefruit in half was just too much effort.
That is how sick I am.
However, fortified with chicken and veggies and quinoa, I felt that cutting and preparing a grapefruit for eating was something I could manage at that moment.
Em was standing at the kitchen counter beside me, and I asked her if she wanted the other half.
The look on her face said it all.
Funny how much you can ascertain from a human or canine or even feline face for that matter.
Em suggested I eat the grapefruit half the Homer Simpson way: dip it in sugar. Lick the sugar off. Dip it again. Repeat as many times as desired.
As tempting as that was, I didn't succumb.
Since Em didn't want the grapefruit half, I put it in a plastic container.
Which I promptly put back in the plastic container cupboard.
I know Em watched me do this.
What I don't know is how come she didn't say anything to me about it.
About a half hour later, Stephen is digging through our plastic container cupboard (I actually have a story about our plastic container cupboard, Stephen's mother and our wedding day. Remind me to tell you about it later.) looking for a container for his leftover chicken stir fry.
I am at the kitchen table trying to muster enough brain power and motor abilities to input the grades for the seeminly never ending infernal intro papers.
There were times when I felt like those damned papers were cursed. As in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows cursed. Remember, when he and Ron and Hermione and some ugly elf were in this room and every time they touched something a whole bunch more of those somethings appeared.
Everytime I touched one paper, twenty more appeared.
Anyway, Stephen is squatting low to see if he can locate a container with a matching lid for his stir fry.
Finding both is quite a challenge, believe me.
When he exclaims, "Why the hell is there a grapefruit in the plastic container cupboard!"
I took it to be a rhetorical question.
The book, right, the book I was so excited about.
Room by Emma Donoghue.
Written from the point of view of a 5 year old boy, born in captivity.
His mother was kidnapped at 19.
Impregnated by her captor.
The boy has never been out of the Room.
I'm already half way through.
And chances are, I'll need to read it again, because its one of those books you read once to figure out what happened.
And then again to figure out how come what happened, happened.
I'll keep you posted.
Title Lyric: Grapefruit Diet by Weird Al Yankovic
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