I feel like the only place I get sick is at work. Both times I’ve had COVID I’m pretty sure it came from work, though the second time I did spend like 4 fours alternately shouting and talking intimately with people in a confined space so that might’ve been it. This week I was there A LOT, more than is appropriate honestly, and by the end of my shift Friday I was for sure sick. Sorry to all the customers who might’ve gotten a cold from me serving them drinks, perhaps you should invest in a better society for working people rather than, I don’t know, quarter zip sweaters and bad jewelry?
ROSES AND THORNS
When I got to college I heard about kids who would sit down to dinner with their parents and name three good things and three bad things that they saw or experienced that day, they’d call them Roses and Thorns. This sounded like a nice way of communicating as opposed to my childhood of spending dinner hoping that we’d sit late enough to miss the boring syndicated episode of MASH and be dining just as the awesome syndicated episode of Night Court was coming on. So now I’m stealing this idea for what may or may not be a running feature!
THORNS:
BEING SICK! I may have tipped my hand here but man, being sick sucks absolute shit! You feel bad! You sleep bad! You cannot form thoughts that are worth a damn!
I spent over 13 hours at my job within 24 hours, and oh boy, that was also terrible!
I also made some very bad transit choices while sick! I tried gaming the system and failed very badly! Sometimes when it says you’ve got to wait 20 minutes for a train just fucking do it! If there is some sort of god of transit, it is only malicious and wants to strike us all down for, like, inventing cars I guess.
ROSES:
Everything that you get to do because you’re sick is great! Laying around all day! Watching infinite television! Even if that television is just sports and that one channel that somehow is always playing Fringe! Have you seen this? FRINGE ALL DAY BABY! I still don’t totally understand the plot of that show but I find the presence of Ana Torv and Joshua Jackson (pre-Fatal Attraction because he looks NASTY on that show) and Lance Reddick (RIP) AND all the soft lighting and the vague sci-fi action very soothing.
The day after being sick rules super hard! Breathing properly and sleeping well after not doing so is a treat! Plus you are hungry as hell and can be like “I WAS JUST SICK! I CAN BREAK MY PASTA ONLY ONCE A WEEK RULE!” You can also extend your laziness one extra day “just to be sure” you don’t relapse! More sports! More Fringe!
This got washed out a little by the sickness but the day I started feeling sick I ate a truly huge mortadella sandwich, its goodness cutting through the slight illness that I had already felt. For a moment I thought that the sandwich had a hand in my sickness but I know that my beloved Mortadella could never do such a thing to me.
SOUND OF THE WEEK
This could be a song or just like a sound I heard or something. MY SUBSTACK MY RULES!
During the rare moments when sports and Fringe were in commercial breaks, I was happy to find that the best Arnold movie, The Running Man (I will fight you about this one), was on one of the stations that usually only plays Marvel movies. A little digging into the credits revealed that Harold Faltermeyer (you know him) did the score and co-wrote this unbelievably incongruent theme song for the movie. The attempt to make the video into a kind of St. Elmo’s Fire, which John Parr also sang, type film integration is a bonus bit of hilarity. I will say that I could not get through the entire 6 minutes of the video’s runtime.
CELEBRITY SIGHTING OF THE WEEK
In case you didn’t know, I LIVE IN NEW YORK and there are a lot of celebrities here. I often see them and now I’m going to tell you about them.
Apparently, a fair amount of people from the Bachelor/Bachelorette Universe come into where I work. I cannot recognize them because sports and Top Chef and The Great Pottery Throwdown and (sigh) Blown Away are the only reality television shows I watch. Feel free to let your mind run wild with the possibility of them being the most interesting people from the Bachelor/Bachelorette, I’ll never know! It isn’t because I don’t like it, I just have the time for more of that kind of thing!
BYE BYE!