Run It Back

Two weeks off is a lot in this economy, but I did it over the holidays. There's a recovery and adjustment period, sure, when you go back to work, but you can always decide to ease back in by pretending you're "still catching up on all these backlog emails, dang." If you work from home (as I do most days), nobody can tell you'd just spent 40 minutes staring blankly at a random patch of the wall behind your computer monitor because your brain forgot how to function on the typical sleep-deprivation-papered-over-with-stimulants-and-carbs regimen you somehow choose to survive on as a default 50 weeks per year. It really is something that "vacation mode" is the same as "actually fulfilling approach to human existence."

I acknowledge of course that some people are just better at work schedule balancing and self-care than I am and, while I'm certainly a product of a capitalist system indifferent to any aspects of my internality (let alone my flourishing), nobody is making me stay up until 1:30 am on a work night watching YouTube videos of other people learning how to play guitar. Dopamine and spite together are basically meth.

Having the Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday holiday fall the weekend after I got back from leave seemed almost greedy, like too much to expect in an economy built around shame for non-work. A three-day weekend and a four-day work week? What is this, France? Well, it is Southern California, so there are sections of the country who would assume it's a lot like dirty, socialist-enabling France, but they'd change their tune if they saw how little we had to offer in terms of decent pastry and public smoking.

The plan for the weekend? Go to LA and see friends, eat good food, watch playoff football, be the Platonic ideal of not-contributing.

Friday I was suddenly very tired around 7:30 pm. Odd, but I guess to be expected in the post-vacation readjustment period. Saturday morning the congestion (head AND chest) started. Then the freight-train headache and total abandonment of my will to stay upright. Mask on, I headed to Ralphs for some tests ($10 for one! The free ones I had in an unopened mailer pouch in the kitchen I found had expired at some point in '22). Two nostril impalements and 15 minutes later, I found myself here again: COVID-positive. Fuck.

Lesson one: if you plan to get the COVID vaccine shot for the year, just do it, don't wait. You'll just feel stupid later.

Lesson two: if you're going to get sick, do it when the person/people you live with is/are out of town for a few days at least.

My son/lodger was up on a mountain getaway with his lady-friend, so I was able to quarantine with my run of the house, already a huge step up from my first go-round with this bullshit that had me locked in my room for the better part of two weeks. That infection I had acquired while actually on vacation in sunny, glorious Switzerland. I wouldn't change a thing. Well, except the getting COVID, I would actually change that given the chance, now that I think about it seriously. I'll have to re-do Bern and Lausanne some day.

He came back eventually, so since Monday I've been largely either in my room alone or downstairs at my work station, in what's supposed to the be family room of this 1990s tract house. So far he isn't sick, fingers crossed. I re-tested for the first time last night and I'm still positive. The line was pretty faint so I'm pretending that means it's almost gone. I'm not sure if that's how it works, but I know with COVID, we're allowed to basically make up our own science, so that's the truth I've decided on.

Things could be a lot worse, of course. My lungs appear to be in no danger. I don't even have the hacking, whooping cough that kicked my ass for a month after I "recovered" last time, though it's still early. There was about 48 hours of feeling pretty floor-of-a-1980s-New-York-taxi-cab, but overall it's been survivable. Do I mean that literally? Well, this blog post is not being produced by a designated executor of my estate, so, yeah. But also I'd already breathed virus all over all the common areas before he got back, so my son has been quarantined as much or more than I have been, leaving me with some more freedom of movement than the first experience. My mental health around it all has been pretty patchy, but in the back of my head, I know I've survived worse. I mean both in my first experience with COVID and a lungs-having vertebrate in general. After the Switzerland Incident, I spent collective weeks if not months with an active, nasty cough every time I got even the smallest cold over the course of the next 18 months, for which I blamed on COVID-related respiratory damage. They gave me an asthma inhaler and everything. But so far, this time? I only cough when I have to dislodge something truly disgusting from my chest. As irritating as this all has been, I feel like I'm winning.

Watch this space next week when I report that the constant feeling of being waterboarded by my own post-nasal drip has returned and the people at Ricola offer to buy me a houseboat or something. I'm prepared to swallow my words. And then immediately cough them up again.