vid head

slide whistle solo

I think I might finally have the bug—you know the one.

My bones feel like ghost bones and my head feels like someplace you might rent out to throw a party.

Not my head, very much my vibe. // Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

I’m not entirely against it; in some ways it was beginning to feel odd to fall outside this common experience, evidence that I am too good at isolating and following rules. And I’m fully vaccinated, so I don’t anticipate it being very bad. I happen to have a lot of soup around, and I need to catch up on reading for blurbs and an in-person event (this one, June 1).

The first stages of getting sick are always very strange to me: there’s an odd sparkle, a strange lurch in how things look. Am I? Nah, can’t be. My therapist called me after my appointment yesterday to say that he had begun experiencing symptoms and tested positive a few hours later. I know it isn’t that common to get covid symptoms the same day as an exposure, but the nature of an evolving virus makes everything we know about it potential rather than hard fact, and no experience of it is really possible to rule out.

I always found deciding to be the most challenging part of being sick. At what point do you decide it’s bad enough to stay home from work/school, given that doing so will mess you up or deplete a rare vacation day? When do you have enough evidenceI was big on trying to muscle through, especially when I was a smoker, because I didn’t want to get lectures. It wasn’t ever an easy decision.

This era has made it more automatic, at least among my friends. If you’ve been exposed, you cancel your whole calendar immediately. (Especially if you weren’t that enthused about the activity in the first place.) That’s good and responsible and everything, but sometimes I worry that it’s allowed a level of flakiness into relationships and being in public. Too easy to hit the eject button when the friction of being around other people is really necessary and quite good.

Usually I would go back over these thoughts and try to shape them a little more, but I don’t really have the brains for it at the moment, unforch.

some things I’m grateful for, 5/20/22
I saw a man carrying a beautiful lizard in an aquarium tank through the Giant Eagle parking lot yesterday
the idea of looking for the call to adventure
the weird relief of needing to rest
a four-day Airbnb booking, which means a break from cleaning and turning it over
“Groove is in the Heart” Deee-lite