Imagria Uncorked

"It is in these moments of tender and ridiculous nostalgia that I know something inside me is still..."

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 14:22:46 -0800

“It is in these moments of tender and ridiculous nostalgia that I know something inside me is still broken.”

- Steve Almond (via growing-orbits)
I think I’m in trouble.

gizakawayusu: “For you who is being bullied” by Shoko...

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 07:26:19 -0800

gizakawayusu:

“For you who is being bullied” by Shoko Nakagawa

Get away You have to put yourself first

There is no need to strain yourself to go to school. Bullying is senseless, there is no point in withstanding it. Getting away from bullying is totally different from running away. I want you to think about putting yourself first.

When I was in middle school, I always thought “I want to die”. I was ignored, people talked behind my back, and in the end I didn’t even go to my graduation ceremony. I was drawing alone, and people laughed at me saying I was gross. I wanted to talk back and say “You have no right to tell me such things!”, but I just coulnd’t get the words out.

“The world doesn’t consist of just school” I was told. “What do you know!?” I thought at that time, but before I knew I started to think like that too. After all school is a just a little world made of no more than just tens of people. Even if it’s put together compulsorily it’s still strenuous.

When I often observed the bullies, I saw that they could choose one person from their circle and were pleased to ignore them. “They’re senseless from the bottom of their heart” I thought. They’re people that don’t understand the pain of others. So even if I died, the one who would receive damage wouldn’t be those bullies, but only my own family. So I decided to stop this pointless thinking.

I was saved by the world of hobbies. Doesn’t matter how many times I’m called otaku, I like drawing, reading manga and playing games. Now you can make friends on the Internet. Because you can meet a lot of wonderful people outside school, I want you to find something to make you happy, even just one thing is enough.

Human beings are born from the miracle of their parents and grandparents meeting, and their existence is a miracle itself. Nobody has the right to meddle with someone else’s life.

(translated by gizakawayusu.tumblr.com)

This is the story of many of us geeks/nerds/otaku. Bravo to Shokotan for speaking for so many who are struggling. Love what you love, passionately.

artist-advice: stephenmccranie: A comic I drew on fighting...

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 21:53:02 -0700

artist-advice:

stephenmccranie:

A comic I drew on fighting procrastination.

www.doodlealley.com

DoodleAlley always has the best advice.

I wish I was better at planning ahead.

mikecrichlow: Recent drawing I did. :) My friend just joined...

Sat, 01 Sep 2012 20:16:45 -0700

mikecrichlow:

Recent drawing I did. :)

My friend just joined Tumblr, go and follow him!

"Before we get to that, let’s remember that the history of the sport we’re talking about..."

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 09:34:00 -0700

“Before we get to that, let’s remember that the history of the sport we’re talking about here is more or less the history of doping. From the end of the 19th century to the present day, competitive cyclists have injected, swallowed, or otherwise consumed for the purposes of performance enhancement wine, brandy, whiskey, Champagne, horse ointment, strychnine, cocaine, cocaine metabolites, cannabis, nitroglycerin, chloroform, aspirin, amphetamines, solucamphre, ronicol, nicotinyl alcohol tartrate, peripheral vasodilators, palfium, fencamfamine, coramine, cortisone, pemoline, tetracosactide, ritalin, probenecid, celestone, amineptine, HGH, HCG, EPO, bromantan, bronchodilators, clenbuterol, ephedrine, norbolethone, probenecid, norandrosterone, noretiocholanolone, Aranesp, heptaminol, nicethamide, phentermine, clostebol, carphedone, stanozolol, prednisolone, prednisone, triamcinolone acetonide, metelonone, benzoylecgonine, methylecgonine, triamcinolone acetonide, salbutamol, salmeterol, finasteride, dehydroepiandrosterone, methylhexanamine, methoxy polyethylene glycol-epoetin beta, and powdered boar testicles. To name a few.”

- Tommy Craggs on Lance Armstrong, doping, and the sport of cycling. Who knows if it’s true, it’s really funny. http://deadspin.com/5738218

QFT. And because I have to have some calcium/dairy in my coffee...

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 22:23:49 -0700

QFT. And because I have to have some calcium/dairy in my coffee now if I want to stay healthy. (Rare medical condition. Really.)

phbr: ∞ Until the very end ∞ // original | edit SOMEONE NEEDS...

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 00:32:51 -0700

phbr:

∞ Until the very end ∞ // original | edit
SOMEONE NEEDS TO MAKE HP IN MANGA FORM

Oh, they have, if by “they” you mean “fans,” and by “fans” you mean “yaoi doujinshi artists.” :)

Kierkegaard (or, as I like to call him, SK) was a formative...

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 16:41:03 -0700

Kierkegaard (or, as I like to call him, SK) was a formative philosophical and theological influence on my thinking. This fits him perfectly!

From Kate Beaton’s wonderfully quirky comic, Hark! A Vagrant.

blueinkalchemy: nichellen: Kulula is a low-cost South-African...

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 09:43:19 -0700

blueinkalchemy:

nichellen:

Kulula is a low-cost South-African airline that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Check out their new livery! And have a read about their Customer Relations.

Kulula is an Airline with head office situated in Johannesburg. Kulula airline attendants make an effort to make the in-flight “safety lecture” and announcements a bit more entertaining. Here are some real examples that have been heard or reported:

On a Kulula flight, (there is no assigned seating, you just sit where you want) passengers were apparently having a hard time choosing, when a flight attendant announced, “People, people we’re not picking out furniture here, find a seat and get in it!”

                —-o0o—-

On another flight with a very “senior” flight attendant crew, the pilot said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve reached cruising altitude and will be turning down the cabin lights. This is for your comfort and to enhance the appearance of your flight attendants.”

                ——o0o—-

On landing, the stewardess said, “Please be sure to take all of your belongings.. If you’re going to leave anything, please make sure it’s something we’d like to have.”

——o0o—-

“There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there are only 4 ways out of this airplane.”

                —-o0o—-

“Thank you for flying Kulula. We hope you enjoyed giving us the business as much as we enjoyed taking you for a ride.”

                —-o0o—-

As the plane landed and was coming to a stop at Durban Airport , a lone voice came over the loudspeaker: “Whoa, big fella. WHOA!”

                —-o0o—-

After a particularly rough landing during thunderstorms in the Karoo , a flight attendant on a flight announced, “Please take care when opening the overhead compartments because, after a landing like that, sure as hell everything has shifted.”

                —-o0o—-

From a Kulula employee: ” Welcome aboard Kulula 271 to Port Elizabeth. To operate your seat belt, insert the metal tab into the buckle, and pull tight. It works just like every other seat belt; and, if you don’t know how to operate one, you probably shouldn’t be out in public unsupervised.”

—-o0o—-

“In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, masks will descend from the ceiling. Stop screaming, grab the mask, and pull it over your face. If you have a small child travelling with you, secure your mask before assisting with theirs. If you are travelling with more than one small child, pick your favourite.”

                —-o0o—-

Weather at our destination is 50 degrees with some broken clouds, but we’ll try to have them fixed before we arrive. Thank you, and remember, nobody loves you, or your money, more than Kulula Airlines.”

——o0o—-

“Your seats cushions can be used for flotation; and in the event of an emergency water landing, please paddle to shore and take them with our compliments.”

—-o0o—-

“As you exit the plane, make sure to gather all of your belongings. Anything left behind will be distributed evenly among the flight attendants. Please do not leave children or spouses.”

—-o0o—-

And from the pilot during his welcome message: “Kulula Airlines is pleased to announce that we have some of the best flight attendants in the industry. Unfortunately, none of them are on this flight!”

                —-o0o—-

Heard on Kulula 255 just after a very hard landing in Cape Town : The flight attendant came on the intercom and said, “That was quite a bump and I know what y’all are thinking. I’m here to tell you it wasn’t the airline’s fault, it wasn’t the pilot’s fault, it wasn’t the flight attendant’s fault, it was the asphalt.”

—-o0o—-

Overheard on a Kulula flight into Cape Town , on a particularly windy and bumpy day: During the final approach, the Captain really had to fight it. After an extremely hard landing, the Flight Attendant said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to The Mother City. Please remain in your seats with your seat belts fastened while the Captain taxis what’s left of our
airplane to the gate!”

—-o0o—-

Another flight attendant’s comment on a less than perfect landing “We ask you to please remain seated as Captain Kangaroo bounces us to the terminal.”

—-o0o—-

An airline pilot wrote that on this particular flight he had hammered his ship into the runway really hard. The airline had a policy which required the first officer to stand at the door while the passengers exited, smile, and give them a “Thanks for flying our airline. He said that, in light of his bad landing, he had a hard time looking the passengers in the eye, thinking that someone would have a smart comment. Finally everyone had gotten off except for a little old lady walking with a cane. She said, “Sir, do you mind if I ask you a question?” “Why, no Ma’am,” said the pilot. “What is it?” The little old lady said, “Did we land, or were we shot down?”

                —-o0o—-

After a real crusher of a landing in Johannesburg , the attendant came on with, “Ladies and Gentlemen, please remain in your seats until Captain Crash and the Crew have brought the aircraft to a screeching halt against the gate. And, once the tire smoke has cleared and the warning bells are silenced, we will open the door and you can pick your way through the wreckage to the terminal..”

                —-o0o—-

Part of a flight attendant’s arrival announcement: “We’d like to thank you folks for flying with us today.. And, the next time you get the insane urge to go blasting through the skies in a pressurized metal tube, we hope you’ll think of Kulula Airways.”

                —-o0o—-

Heard on a Kulula flight. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to smoke, the smoking section on this airplane is on the wing.. If you can light ‘em, you can smoke ‘em.”

                —-o0o—-

A plane was taking off from Durban Airport . After it reached a comfortable cruising altitude, the captain made an announcement over the intercom, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Welcome to Flight Number 293, non-stop from Durban to Cape Town , The weather ahead is good and, therefore, we should have a smooth and uneventful flight.. Now sit back and relax… OH, MY GOODNESS!” Silence followed, and after a few minutes, the captain came back on the intercom and said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I am so sorry if I scared you earlier. While I was talking to you, the flight attendant accidentally spilled a cup of hot coffee in my lap. You should see the front of my pants!” A passenger then yelled, “That’s nothing. You should see the back of mine!”

Dear Kulula,

Please fly worldwide. I’d take your flights anywhere.

Love, me.

The humor is awesome, but it wouldn’t, um, ever fly in this safety obsessed, litigious country. Making jokes about crashing and safety problems…asking for trouble. Love the livery too!

Art Store Weebs

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 23:39:18 -0700

weeaboo-stories:

A bit of backstory before I begin—I met my best friend, Li in first grade. She had just moved to America from China with her mom, Mai. Li was struggling with her English, so I helped her with it. Because I spent so much time with her, I picked up a good amount of Chinese. When Li and I started middle school, we both enrolled in Chinese classes, so I’m semi-fluent in Chinese. I’m full-blooded Irish, but I’m ‘black Irish’—I have a tanner complexion, dark hair, and dark eyes. Couple that with the fact that I speak Chinese, a lot of people assume I’m Asian.

Mai owns an art shop in our city’s ‘Little Asia’ district, so Li and I spend a lot of time in the shop helping her run the store. Most of the store’s customers are art lovers, friends of Mai’s, or Asian people. One particularly slow day, Mai, Li and I are in the shop, talking about school. Mai speaks English pretty well, but she prefers to speak Chinese if possible, so a lot of the conversations I have with her are in Chinese. We’re so absorbed in the conversation that we didn’t notice anyone come in until we hear a loud squeal.

Read More

I’ve been confused for Japanese before too. Sometimes by other Asians, and even actual Japanese, in Japan! (That was years ago.) But this experience is more akin and only a step above the time when someone taunted me by calling me a Jap in middle school. Not cool. Really, really shows that it takes a lot more than liking one small bit of a different culture to actually know something about it or to stop making gross generalizations about it. Sigh. I should stop reading this blog before I start getting even more jaded about fandom than I already am.

phbr: SO GOOD I feel zinged.

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 10:15:18 -0700

phbr:

SO GOOD

I feel zinged.

weeaboo stories: Speak Japanese for us!

Sat, 09 Jun 2012 11:57:00 -0700

weeaboo stories: Speak Japanese for us!:

weeaboo-stories:

I’ll start off by introducing myself. My name is Grace. I am an American citizen, although my family is Japanese. My parents are quite traditional, and we live in our city’s Little Tokyo. My family-grandparents and parents-own a shop that sells Japanese trinkets like paper fans, kimonos, some…

What’s really sad is that for many of us Asians and Asian Americans who are Christian, we’ve heard the charge that we are abandoning our ancestral traditions before—from our families and relatives. To hear that from a weeaboo for whom this isn’t a live, painful issue must be truly infuriating. It’s the worst form of Orientalism.

And from cheesy we go to a genuinely literate, moving, and...

Sat, 12 May 2012 22:21:03 -0700

And from cheesy we go to a genuinely literate, moving, and tuneful album. Shame these guys broke up.

I have been listening to this extremely corny neo-prog album...

Fri, 11 May 2012 10:31:32 -0700

I have been listening to this extremely corny neo-prog album way, way too much. To me it sounds like the sort of soundtrack a cheesy fantasy movie would have. And yet it’s so catchy…

Reinhold Niebuhr + Justin Bieber = unholy union of theology and...

Sat, 05 May 2012 19:41:52 -0700

Reinhold Niebuhr + Justin Bieber = unholy union of theology and pretty boy. This seminary graduate needs to perform exorcism on his eyes now.

moritheil: muttshroom: WOW THANK YOU FOR BOTH YOUR...

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:56:09 -0700

moritheil:

muttshroom:

WOW THANK YOU FOR BOTH YOUR PROFESSIONALISM AND FOR YOUR CLARITY, GIGANTIC SUBTITLES

[SPEAKING SARCASTICALLY]

To be fair, I’ve sat in a room with native speakers of Chinese (as they rewound clips of Mal speaking Chinese 5 or 6 times) and seen how insanely difficult it is to make out what he’s saying. Apparently his accent is pretty atrocious, on top of which not all of what they’re speaking in Firefly is standard Chinese. There’s some kind of slang use of words involved.

So in other words, translator fail? Yes. But it’s actually legitimately hard to translate Firefly’s Chinese at times.

What’s really funny is that I can’t remember even seeing a Chinese or Asian person in Firefly at all. In a universe where people swear in Mandarin, which would indicate cultural dominance, you’d think there’d be enough people who could pronounce things properly!

Then again there are countries where English is the business language but with nary an American, Brit, Canadian, or Australian around.

Exchanging Wings

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 21:47:00 -0700

Another 2DT prompt piece, inspired by the depiction of angels in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire.

“It’s only eternity, Sachiel.” The way Metatron shrugged and smiled was infuriating. He knew as well as everyone else in the Host what the consequences were.

“So you’ve never been tempted to do it, either?” I challenged him.

He just laughed and sat back in his chair. “Come on. We watch these people every day for our jobs. You can tell me honestly that you’re envious of that?”

“Well…” I thought of Teresa’s sad face when she came back to her empty apartment. Of the times she hovered the blade over her wrists in the bathroom sink. Who knew whether it was my inaudible whispers in her ear, or Metatron’s, that drew her hand back. But that was not something to envy.

But then, the determination on her brow the next day, as if she knew she had been given a second chance. Small good things. Small smiles. A desire to see more of those things in her life. And also be a part of them.

Metatron sighed. “I know, I know,” he said. He rubbed his forehead. “It’s the sort of thing He might want to do. But we’re not Him, and we’re not them either. That’s not what we’re about, you know? We’re in between beings. Someone has to be in the middle.”

“I didn’t ask to be in the middle.”

“And are you sure you’re not just doing this to get some of the credit for yourself?” Metatron was smiling again, but blinking in curiosity. “I mean, you know that’s how—”

“You know I’m not like that guy.”

“I didn’t say you were. He wanted to keep his powers too, not like you. And it’s not like you’re asking for the army too.”

“Can you imagine me at the head of the Host? That’s a good one.” I chuckled. “Anyways, I already put in my application. They’ll approve it, I’m sure.”

“The very act of applying pretty much guarantees it.” Metatron sighed. “Well, as much as an angel can miss someone, I’ll miss you, Sachiel. I’ll try to say hi to you every once in a while, but who knows if you’ll ever hear me.”

“Probably not, no.”

“Well, shoot. And think about what you’re leaving behind. I’m going to have to hear another boring sermon from Gabriel about dangerous female charges and temptation and ‘This Is How The Angel Drowned’…”

My spark of divinity, I knew, was going to fade in a day or two. But as Metatron continued talking about the inconveniences of losing his partner, pretending to be annoyed even though it wasn’t possible for angels to be actually annoyed, I realized I would miss him too. Maybe that was the first sign that I was changing. He sure likes to work fast on some things.

Reunion Day

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 21:21:00 -0700

Another piece inspired by 2DTeleidoscope’s writing prompt. This is fiction.

“Jeez, you haven’t changed at all, Peter.” Rachel’s first words to me in ten years sounded more disappointed than surprised. But she held out her arms anyway: “Come here, you,” she said, and we embraced. “How are you, anyway?”

“Good, good,” I replied. “So what are you up to these days?” I caught a whiff of alcohol from her breath as we let each other go and the pleasantries continued. The other old classmates slipped themselves around us as we talked.

“To be honest, I didn’t think you’d come,” Rachel said. “This didn’t seem like your sort of thing.”

“Oh. Well, I just thought—you know—”

“That I might be here?” She grinned slyly.

“Hey, this wasn’t your sort of thing either,” I said. “But.” I stared down at my shoes sheepishly. “I guess so?” I looked up hesitantly.

Rachel laughed heartily and hugged me again. This exuberance was new. “You’re such a sweetheart, Peter! Why did we break up again? Anyways, let’s—” She reached over for the cheap plastic wine glass she had set down on a table behind her, half filled with chardonnay, and raised it. “—have a toast. To our reunion. Hey, where’s your glass?”

“I don’t drink anymore,” I said.

“Oh. Ok.” She seemed flustered for just one moment, the clichéd reunion scene having gone off-script. Finally she spotted a nearly empty cup and thrust it in front of my face. “Here.”

“Okay…” I took the cup gingerly, trying not to get used to holding a wine glass again, and raised it.

“To our reunion,” she said. I echoed.

We clicked plastic glass to plastic glass. She never used to make me do stupid ritualistic stuff like this. We made fun of the people who did. But now: the flush on her cheeks, bobbing her head to the Sugar Ray song.

“You seem energetic these days,” I finally said.

“Really? I don’t feel all that different. I still don’t know what—”

“It’s ok.” I put the glass she had handed me down. “Listen, it was great seeing you and—”

She tugged at my sleeve. “So soon? Don’t you want to, you know, catch up a little more?” Now I saw the sadness, the same forlorn flicker in her eyes when we left for our different universities, the one that knew that our emails, phone calls, and visits would dwindle into nothing.

“Well. All right.” I tried my best to shrug coolly. “Let’s ditch these losers and find somewhere to talk, ok?”

“Yeah.” The old smile returned. “Let’s do it.”

“But I can’t have anything, all right?”

“That’s ok.” She somehow found a bottle that hadn’t been drained and grabbed it by the neck. “I’ll have enough for both of us.”

“This is going to be a long night, isn’t it?” She just rolled her eyes and laughed again.

We found a quiet corner away from the crowd and we talked. The party ended and we moved to the front seats of my car and talked some more as she would drink and drink another. Between night and blue dawn the hours flowed freely with the memories and the pain.

Strange Tempo

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 15:52:00 -0700

Prompted by 2DTeleidoscope’s writing challenge.

I was never good at keeping time. “You’re playing too fast,” my piano teacher would tell me as I ran through Bach’s “Minuet in G” for the fourth time, and she would wind up the metronome, set its weight to adagio, and let it go. Tock. Tock. Tock. Tock. If it was slow enough, I could follow the regimented time, my fingers pressing harder on the keys on the downbeat.

But the rhythm in my head and the rhythm of the metronome never stayed in sync for long. It was like my brain was telling my fingers to hurry up and get to the end of the measure, the end of the piece.

Some time in high school, I stopped playing classical music and started playing jazz. Now there was a drummer to keep time, but the thing with jazz is that sometimes you don’t play on the beat: you slip the notes between the snare and the bass drum, fills and chords and riffs dancing atop the rhythm section. It is a delicate and precise syncopated dance, though; even a quarter or eighth note early or late and it sounds as clumsy as a dancer with leaden feet, fumbling and stepping on his partner’s toes.

And so I would sometimes come in too early. “Watch your tempo. Feel it,” my band director said. And I would try. I would get it right about, oh, 75% of the time. I’d practice the entrance over and over, but I’d still slip. And every time I tried to feel it, it would be off.

But when I was alone—either at home when my parents were away, or when church youth group had ended and I sat by myself in the dark with the piano while the rest of the kids played, socialized and did other things that didn’t come naturally to me—I would play what I wanted. They were just chords, cadences, and arpeggios, flowing out of my fingers, the sustain pedal pulling back the dampers and letting the notes echo through the empty room. They were pop melodies, I-IV-V-relative minor languid sappy concoctions that reeked of virginal angst.

Often, I’d close my eyes when I played these musical doodles, and with no metronome, no drummer, no teacher telling me when to start, I’d let myself go. I played as fast and as slowly as I wanted, following the tempo of my own emotions. Years of lessons and practice had taught me where things were on the keyboard; it was up to my mind, heart, and fingers to explore, in silent rhythm, the curse of being out-of-sync with the rest of the world.

The Long Limbo

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:27:00 -0800

Warning: contains a lot of whining (or whinging, if you are from the UK) about my not-quite-yet-over illness. I felt like I needed to get this out of my system, though, along with…other things. You are free to TL;DR all you want. :)

I’m still, technically, not yet healed from my long illness, though the fevers have now subsided to a splitting headache and the coughing down to a work-acceptable level (or so I thought). Climbing stairs still leaves me breathless. Mornings are still vaguely nauseous.

The doctors emphasized to me how common this illness is around this season. Early on, not long after I got sick, I had been warned many people suffer from symptoms for 2 weeks, or even longer. I remember thinking: that probably won’t happen to me, right? Well, it’s been almost exactly two weeks since I started feeling the chills, the dizziness, and the weakness as my friends and I walked through the galleries of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I remember having to go into the dark rooms showing obscure Jean-Luc Godard movies and other video art to sit, because I couldn’t walk anymore. Getting to the bus stop after that felt torturous, and I was shuddering with fever on the 4.5 hour bus ride and hour-long Metro ride home to Washington DC.

The first week after my New York trip was filled with shivering, sharp stabbing headaches, lying in bed, and 2-3 hour scraps of darkness that passed for sleep and naps. There was the constant popping of pills: Tylenol at first, then ineffective, expensive Tamiflu, which had been prescribed by an urgent care doctor who cheerfully informed me after a cursory stethoscope exam and a chest x-ray that I had the flu, and not pneumonia. “Just a little congestion in the lungs here,” he said, pointing at a small dark spot in my left lung. “Not too much.” But the Tamiflu actually made things worse, delaying the effect of the Tylenol and not relieving the symptoms one bit. The Tylenol was already weak, only keeping the fever down for 4 hours at most and not relieving the stabbing headaches—it was like a vise gripping my forehead over my left eye—at all.

Only after I returned to California and visited the emergency room did I get a much more robust prescription of ibuprofen, which kept the fever down for a good 7 hours at a time and made both Tylenol and Tamiflu superfluous. It also relieved the headaches much more. When I felt the shivering and the headaches return, I knew it was time to take another pill.

The coughing, oddly enough, began only in the past week. There was no coughing when my fever was highest. Only once the temperature had gone down to between 100-102F did the hacking, constant coughing begin. It was hard to breathe normally or go to sleep. Over-the-counter Robotussin had no effect. Only 2 days ago did I receive codeine-based cough suppressant, which worked and made the coughing go down to a more tolerable level. I also received antibiotics, just in case what I had was actually pneumonia. It’s not probably not, though the symptoms are somewhat similar.

The worst part was the waiting. When, I kept wondering, could I go back to work? When could normal life begin again, and replace this medicine-popping, Netflix watching, napping and lying down existence? The one time I tried to return to work early, last Friday, my boss sent me home after hearing the coughing. (I had not yet gotten the cough medicine, but I thought it had gone down enough. Wrong.) Every time I thought “it’s just about over,” something kept lingering. First it was the fever; then it was the coughing. Before long, I had run out of sick leave, and so I returned to the office at the earliest opportunity when the fever seemed to have finally broken a little (ie: I didn’t wake up with one, though it’d come back in the afternoons) and the coughing seemed under control.

Only to get, most likely, two of my coworkers behind me ill. One was out today after seeing symptoms yesterday. The other, we will see, since she comes in to work on Fridays but not Thursdays. She was complaining of nausea on Wednesday though, and she also blames me for giving her illness, reproaching me for not realizing that unlike me she doesn’t have any sick leave at all, and she has a newborn baby. She is probably right. I probably gave it to both of them, since they only started showing symptoms one day after I returned. I worked all alone in the corner today, which was probably for the best. Maybe it’ll be like that tomorrow too. But I feel terrible that I might be responsible for getting them sick. I might have put my own financial and work needs above the health of others.

Maybe I was so eager to return to work because the idleness of the last two weeks had begun to take a toll. I felt like my life couldn’t really progress anywhere so long as I had all this pain, all this discomfort and coughing and the potential of passing it along to others. In a way it was worse than my 5 day hospitalization 4 years ago. That time was well-defined, and the truth of the matter was that I did not really feel nearly as sick then as I did now. I was mostly bored, watching Dr Phil and Judge Judy on the TV and not being able to surf the Internet. Pain was added on to this round, and the uncertainty of just when it was going to end definitively. It seems to be going out with a very long whimper rather than a bang.

It’s too early to say if I learned anything from this experience, other than that my body is fragile and that I was reminded of how little in life is really under my control. That I really need to care for my body, or it will break down without warning. That sounds like the sort of thing God would like to teach me from this situation. I have never been very good at taking care of myself, whether it be in diet or exercise. If there is any good from this time, the minimal, nearly carb-free diet that I had to take during the illness has contributed to some significant weight loss. My normal appetite has not yet quite returned, and I intend to keep the low-carb diet going even afterwards; I hear refined carbs increase the appetite unnaturally. But the long limbo of these late days has forced me to face my once-indulgent lifestyle and recognize that stability, good health, and the ability to work are all blessings to be thankful for. They can be taken away easily. It’s a very different life, to be able to go to work and come home, versus lying in bed half the day, coughing and shivering, wondering when it will end.