- The only thing worse than being sick with a fever when you’re by yourself is being sick with a fever of only 99.5 when you’re by yourself, because even if someone were there with you they wouldn’t feel all that sorry for you.
- Driving home tonight, stuck in traffic and engaging in my favorite pastime of raking myself over the coals, I suddenly remembered that as recently as a decade ago, I used to have a somewhat pathological desire to be liked. I wonder what happened to it.
- Whatever this ailment is I’ve had the last couple days involves rather unpleasant GI symptoms. Nothing major or debilitating, but I had to excuse myself from the office a few times today to head down the hall. On one such visit, I was sitting in the stall minding my own business when some guy came in, shook the door to my stall. There were two empty stalls in there as well, but for some reason he really wanted mine. He assumed, I think, that the door must just have been stuck. I said, rather gruffly, that the stall was occupied. He sighed dramatically, went to the adjacent stall, shut the door, had a seat, and then pulled out his cell phone and started transacting some sort of very important business. Loudly. In one of those voices that says “I drive a Hummer and park in the handicap space.”
For once, my intestines were on the side of decency and good manners. I won’t go into detail, other than to say the resulting noise was loud, and graphic, and prolonged. It took a while for the echoes to die out. After, his voice was notably more subdued. “No,” he said. “I’m outside, on the corner. Yeah. Traffic noise.” So I hit the flush lever.
- Thistle has been mopy. He misses Becky. He spends most of his evenings under the glass-topped coffee table with my Eocene fish fossils in it, stretching out on the Afghan rug, listening with eyes closed as Becky stands nearby and plays her violin. He’s seemed out of sorts with her gone, dissatisfied in his spot under the table. So I lay there on the floor with him for a while, and though he graciously allowed me to pet him he was acting pretty surly — mock charges and grunts and such.
So I turned on the boombox, started playing a CD with some of the pieces Becky plays. The fiirst few chords rang out, and he came out from under the table to look for her. Not finding her, he settled in, closed his eyes, and relaxed into the music. His ears twitched with the movement of the bow. I thought of Bugs Bunny conducting the orchestra with his prehensile ears.
- I am tired of being sick.
