Artichoke Adobo

For those of you who don’t know and who probably don’t give a rat’s ass anyway, I was in bed for the better part of last week and a few days before that. I thought I was suffering from a killer-flu of “The Stand” proportions. Later on I found out the 40-degree C fever was from a bleeding left kidney. Add to that some other minor ailments in the form of a bleeding itch and diarrhea and you can imagine what sort of party I’ve been having with my germs the entire week.

I’ve come to the conclusion that getting sick for real is simply not fun. While you do get to stay home and away from the office for a little bit, the disadvantages of getting sick in bed simply outweigh the pros. Here are some reasons why:

1. Thinking that you’re probably gonna die alone.
There is nothing better at making you feel that you’re all alone in the world than being sick and home alone. Killer combo if you ask me. I ended up feeling so sorry for myself. You know that there’s something wrong with the world when it’s a struggle to even just get up and fix yourself a glass of juice. I was giving myself a sponge bath most of the time (although Mox was sweet enough to do that for me whenever she was around), almost falling over everytime I had to answer the phone, crawling my way to the bathroom to take a piss.

2. Everyone you can hang with is probably in the office. You know those zombie movies where the hero wakes up and finds that everyone in the world is dead/gone. He starts thinking “Hey this is not such a bad deal, I get to go into any store I want and take whatever I want. The world is gonna be my playground.”. That, of course, lasts for like 5 minutes and then the hero desperately runs through the streets looking for even just one survivor. Staying home on a weekday feels like that. I mean there are just so many “Friends” re-runs that you can watch before you start craving for human contact. Sad thing is, everyone is at work and you end up picking up the phone and not knowing who to dial.

Mr. Lonely found out it's not much fun looking at Playboys when all the models are dead.

3. There’s very little you can do when you’re burning up
Neither porn nor cartoons held any interest for me. I couldn’t even prop myself up to read through a chapter of “A Storm of Swords”. So what good is staying home if you can’t even entertain yourself?

4. Eat cardboard! Drink water!
Everything starts to taste like cardboard and water especially after you’ve been on medication for a good period of time. I lost about 8 pounds in the week that I was sick mostly due to the fact that I had very little in the way of appetite the entire time. This probably helped in the healing process. I virtually had to avoid all the types of food I love (beef, shellfish, tuna, legumes, soya, etc.).

5. Your office finds a way to make you work anyway
At this day and age, staying home simply means you get to work from your house. My boss expected me to hook my notebook up and constantly check my email. He could even monitor wherever I was due to the damn cell phone. I spent most of my waking hours either working or worrying about work anyway-- ven had a teleconference with a client while I was on my way to a check-up.

That old Vitamin C commercial had it right. Sa panahon ngayon, bawal magkasakit. Life’s shitty enough when you’re up and about, it’s 10 times shittier when all you can do is scratch your nether regions and mope.

# posted by ManongGuard @ 12:14 PM