She's Writing a Novel

Day 3 of quarantine and I've finally gone mad. I've left the apartment exactly twice, doing little more than circling the block for supplies each time. Even the delight of indulging in hours of terrible reality television has turned rancid. I never thought I would exhaust the possibilities of cable, but I am reaching my limit for hours logged on the couch. I don't even have the attention span for facebook between coughing fits.

The worst part about actual sick days is that one is, in fact, sick. Not merely taking sick time, not clocking out for a mental health day, but necessarily stuck at home due to a total failure of the physical body to function as normal. I.e., I feel awful in addition to slowly going crazy from withdrawal from my routine life. Routine life, which we all talk shit about when we're living it, suddenly seems precious and perfect in all its mundane aspects. Because for all its repetition and predictability, routine life is still life being lived, occasionally holding surprises, relentlessly productive. Also, no matter how tired and defeated I may feel on a regular Tuesday, I am not hacking forth a lung.

Or like they say, at least you have your health.

Growing up you thought this was a trite thing that old people said to each other whenever misfortune struck. As it turns out, they were more or less right. When you don't have your health everything else recedes into the joyless distance. Delicious food is lost when you can't taste it or swallow it. Wine teases you from the shelf when you are already drunk on cherry cough syrup. Sex is...not comprehensible. You try to stimulate yourself with a bombardment of internet and television and books, but it all starts to blur into a swirl of restless discontent. My kingdom for a leisurely jog along a scenic route. Shit, my kingdom for a breath of fresh air. There is no pleasure for the unwell except the promise of being well again.

Russian lover has been the hero of the house while I've been ill. My sick days necessarily crowd his workdays because he often works from home. So there is no escape for him from my coughing and complaining and hours of terrible television. And since he is right there,and since no woman really comprehends that a man who is not "at work" somewhere else should not be interrupted because he is "at work" right here, I am constantly interrupting him to ask for this or that and de facto making him my sick nurse one pathetic throaty request at a time. Water...orange juice...soup...blanket...the remote...water...tissues...that thing over there because I don't want to stand up...water...hug me...no that one over there.

He's borne it all with considerable patience for someone who is trying to run a business at the same time his girlfriend languishes like a wilting diva on the couch. He may still be scarred by my brush with the swine flu in '09, when I made the mistake of showing him the chunky green matter coming up out of my lungs and asking if I should see a doctor (Answer: yes, yes you should. If you can get in to see one before July.) But it's good that I have someone, besides my mother who I won't listen to anyway, telling me to stop and rest and wait until I am well to go back to living full force. Turns out that you get better faster when you don't try to ignore being sick.

But it's Day 3 of quarantine, and I've finally gone mad.

My twenties are over as of today. Yes, 11-11-11. I won't lie; I half expected to gain superpowers or beam into another dimension. It's a milestone birthday on an auspicious birth date, so it's gotta mean something extra special, right?

Eh. I'll chalk it up to the burgeoning wisdom of old age, but I no longer find myself attached to symbolic significance. I appreciate significance and I enjoy symbolism, but they are like friends you enjoy separately because when they get together they just drag each other down. Why get hung up on making meaning from mash-ups when there are so many disparate pleasures to relish? The special is always in the most ordinary singularities.

What surprised me most about today what how I felt almost relieved. Maybe that's the burden of a lived-in decade being lifted off me as the clean-slate of a new one descends. There's no real fresh start, but there is the illusion of one, and that's really all that most of us need to make changes.

I guess I thought I would be sad, or nostalgic, or contemplating various regrets. Instead, I'm almost elated with optimism about the future. My twenties never really suited me any more than my teens; it's been a two-decade long awkward stage for me, and I think my relief is that I sense it coming to an end. Not on this particularly day, necessarily, but in this time of my life.

I'm so glad that I'm not someone who "peaked" at 15 or 18, or 21 or 25. Even if that is somehow the case, it's not how I view life. The best is yet to come, and I'm exactly where I always wanted to be at this age when I was little girl. Big city life, publishing career, beautiful and intelligent (and foreign!) boyfriend; confidence in my beliefs and my being and my body. Middle-school me wrote stories about this woman, and here she (mostly) is. Maybe not as perfect as I pictured her in the 8th grade, but still pretty damn awesome. And that's a present for both of us.

Still haven't shaken the cold, but I'm returning to the office tomorrow. I feel "better," although I'm still fighting back the phlegm. That battle could last weeks. The important thing is that I'm able to engage in routine tasks again without wanting to stop midstream to lay down and die. For the first time in a week, I'm making dinner tonight. Russian lover has been picking up all the slack in that area since I fell ill, preparing elaborate meals for us while I wave at him languidly from the sofa to pour me a glass of wine.

I'm not on any medications aside from the periodic cough drop; I'm generally terrified of pharmaceuticals, even over-the-counter ones. I'm only on birth control because I'm more terrified of having a child than I am of being on the Pill. So when I get sick, I probably suffer more than necessary because I just cannot make myself go on the hard stuff. Until I start coughing up green stuff. So I'll sometimes "enjoy" a glass of wine or two at dinner, even with a cold.

I've learned to know when I'm coming down with something bad because I will suddenly, being fatigued but otherwise fine, not want to touch a single drop of alcohol. Beer, wine, liquor...the thought of any it becomes repulsive. If I have a glass poured for me, or if I'm out with friends, I will sip at it. But I won't enjoy it, I won't finish it, and I won't even consider having another. That's when I know I've reached the tipping point, and I'm tipping straight into several days of being sick as all hell. It's a nice early warning system.

It would be nice, though, to have a warning system that would allow for evasive maneuvers. I only realize I'm getting sick when I'm going to get sick; there's no getting around it at that point. So I have a few extra hours to grab tissues and magazines and orange juice, and start taking inventory of all the plans I'm going to have to cancel. But the course is inevitable; the only question is for how long I'm going to be ill.

This particular cold has got longevity, and that's got me frustrated. It's like hoping you're about to turn a corner only to realize you're just going around in a circle. Each day you're a little bit better...or is it a little bit worse? It all feels about the same after the initial fever has lifted and the aches recede. Not good, not bad, just...not right. Not right, not yet, and no idea when that will change.

Oh well. I suppose I did bring this on myself.

So, at some point just before or after I got sick, I threw my back out. I have a vague idea of how I managed to do it; I started taking these new fitness classes a couple weeks ago, and as I do with most things, I approached them with far more enthusiasm than good judgement.

And when it comes to athletic prowess...well, I don't have any. So this was a particularly dangerous combination. Heretofore I had merely suffered some sore quads, angry calves, throbbing abs, etc. Only enough pain to assure me my efforts were working and I would soon have Gwen Stefani's physique.

Alas, I may have overdone it in that last class with the leg lifts and the stretchy bands.

The Russian lover will laugh (maybe cry or scream) at the notion of me admitting that I "may have overdone" something. This confession is not unusual from me, and it usually precedes some additional declaration of fail. Such as: I'm coughing up green bio-hazard now, or: I'm unable to put on my own pants.

And he's right to be frustrated, because on this point I don't seem to learn from my mistakes. I repeat them with the tenacity of someone who wants to excel at poor decision-making. I appreciate that I'm too intelligent to try picking up heavy things just as my lower back hints it might be on the mend. And then the part of my brain that did not get an A in calculus says, "But the heavy thing, it must be picked up!"

And so here we are with little discernible progress and substantially more chagrin.

No matter how much I promise myself that I WILL be sensible, I WILL, I have an undeniable inclination to flout good sense. Not wanting to be overly self-indulgent, I push myself past all point of making any point. And then, suffering the unnecessarily inflated consequences, I become self-indulgent. And loathing that self-indulgence, I too soon push myself...and, you see the cycle.

I thought the Russian lover was insane --INSANE-- to suggest I take more than one day off of work for the flu last week. But I know, my body knows, that he was right. So why would I never have allowed for that without his insistence? I'm not sure to whom I am trying to prove what; maybe that if I can't get an A in calculus, at least I can get an A in self-flagellation!

Anyway, what's done is done and now my responsibility lies with trying not to do it again. Not not throwing my back out, per se, but not making the masochist's march down the path that inevitably leads to thrown-out backs.

ANYWAY. If I keep this up I'll have to rename the site "She's Keeping a Log of Her Various Maladies." I will try to avoid that.