Monday I felt great but found I had a wee cough. Nothing serious. I thought it was the result of bar over-exposure Friday night.
It wasn’t.
Monday night my chest got tight. By nine thirty it hurt; by eleven I was seriously sick. By four in the morning I Was In Hell. My entire chest, from collarbones to hipbones, was ON FIRE. And it HURT.
Then the cough arrived. The kind of cough that comes from your ankes and hurts like you’re being vivisected with a million tiny little ultrasharp scalpels from the inside. The kind of cough you dread, the kind of cough that makes you stop doing anything and everything else simply so you can brace yourself for the onslaught. The kind of cough that makes your skull hurt and the brains inside feel like they’re exploding.
Monday night was a horrible night.
Tuesday morning I called Buzz at 7:30 and left the most ridiculous message; something along the lines of: “Dude, I am SO FUCKING SICK! {cough, cough} I won’t be in today, like, {cough, cough} at ALL.”
I remember yelling “Shut up!” at the dogs at one point, then trailing off into senselessness before groaning, “Okay, bye then,” and pressing the End button on my cell phone. I would have felt stupid for leaving such an absurd message if I hadn’t been So. Fucking. Sick.
I put myself to bed. I slept probably 18 hours that first day. I ate nothing but water, a package of Top Ramen, and an ear of corn on the cob.
The next day, Wednesday, I called Buzz around noon. “Hi, it’s Michelle. I’m calling in sick,” I rasped.
He chuckled. “I figured, since you weren’t here.”
“Yeah, well. Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow! I think I’m feeling better.”
“Oh, uh-huh,” he laughed.
I was awake maybe a total of ten hours that day, in small intervals. The rest of the time I was passed out, sleeping the sleep of the truly wretchedly ill.
Wednesday Brett had come down with it, but not nearly as bad. He had the cough, and the discomfort, but he at least could still move around. He worked half the day, then watched TV through the afternoon. I made occasional pilgrimages to the kitchen for water and he, ever the tender and gentle lover, started calling me Snot. As in, “Hey, Snot, how’re you feeling?”
Ah, love – know thee no boundaries?
Wednesday night, late, while Brett slept on the couch in front of the flickering images of the SPEED channel, I sipped Echinacea Complete Care in beside the fire and marveled that while I must reek, I was so sick I couldn’t smell myself. In spite of that, I thought for a minute that I was getting better. I thought if I could sleep through the night and get up on time, I might get to work the next day.
Hah! I slept the vast majority of the twenty-four hour period known as ‘Thursday’ as well. I even ran a one-degree temperature for five or six hours last night.
But today! Ah, today! I’ve been awake now since TEN O’CLOCK! I did a load of laundry, and picked up after myself and my husband, and am alert enough now to actually sit in front of the goblinbox and blog! Halleluia!
Begin domestic aside:
Now. I realize my man’s been sick these past few days too. I also realize he’s a good goddamned guy in general. But he’s not half as sick as I am, and he never picks up the slack! I’ve been a slob this week because it was all I could do to boil myself some water, let alone wash dishes or pick up after myself, but he’s been well enough to go places and do things and… and… and STAY AWAKE! He took my slovenly behavior more or less as carte blanche to act like a pig. He didn’t even bother to rinse his dishes, which you’d think would have been ingrained in his thick hide by now.
Am I truly out of line to expect my roommate to occasionally, NOW AND THEN, to go just a tiny bit above and beyond? It’s not like I’m pissed off that I had to cook my own food and make my own tea with a staggering headache – I’ve lived with him long enough to know that bringing home a bottle of NyQuil (and calling me “Snot”) is as far as his sickroom ministrations ever go. But SHIT, people! When the primary homemaker is flat on her aching back with influenza, RINSE YOUR GODDAMNED DISHES ALREADY. Maybe toss a load in the washer, rather than letting the bathroom laundry basket overflow all over the floor. Put your garbage IN THE GARBAGE CAN. Put your shoes on the shoe rack and hang your outerwear where it belongs instead of creating an obstacle course of massive boots and piles of slippers, hats, coats, and jackets in the high-traffic areas your sick and almost-legally-blind-without-her-contact-lenses wife is trying to navigate WHILE RUNNING A FEVER!!!
{Chuckle.} Truly, it’s not that bad – nothing fifteen minutes of shuffling around didn’t set right. But when I surfaced enough to actually see the piles of dishes, garbage, and general crap we’d managed to pile up on every surface, I almost fainted. Snort!
Well, I believe it might be naptime again for the Mushlette. I’m off to check my email, maybe get another few ounces of water in this aching body, and get horizontal. Ciao, babies! BE WELL. (I am so serious.)
Score: Flu 1, Mush 0.
Yesterday afternoon, while I was helping Mr. Brett set the three remaining columns on the porch, I found out that he was havin’ a hankerin’ for Mt. Hamill chicken.
We left for town around 4:30 and met up with the 1-Stop Rental crew for a bit. Jason was in the middle of balancing the till, but still had the manners to say “thank you” when I told him he was cute, and didn’t get pissed off when I bolted the front door and then proceeded to push it open.
Joe hopped in Brett’s truck with us, and we followed Bo home and picked him up, and off we went to find fried chicken!
In Mt. Hamill Iowa, a town consisting of a dirt road and about five buildings, there is a rather large tavern that serves the best fried chicken in the world. The t-shirts you can buy there say, “To get a better piece of chicken, you have to be a rooster!”
I don’t eat chicken, of course, having a trendy eating disorder and all, but the stuff does appear to have a lovely beer batter on it, and you really can’t go wrong with beer batter. But they have a salad bar and they make cocktails, and plus Brett probably wouldn’t leave me at home anyway ’cause he’s bossy like that, so I usually end up going even though I couldn’t care less about fried chicken.
Anyway, there was a cluster of pre-teens in front of the jukebox playing AC/DC songs and singing along that warmed the cockles of Joe’s heart, and Brett was just so damned pleased to be eating fried chicken after craving it all day that I thought my heart would burst for being happy for him. Bo just seemed mellow and glad to be out somewhere.
When you order the chicken dinner at Mt. Hamill, you get half a fried chicken, french fries, cole slaw, a couple of dill pickle chips, and a single piece of white bread with margarine on it. This bounty comes on a styrofoam plate and the meal is piled about four inches deep. The waitresses – there are at least six of them at any given time – never use trays and can carry six or eight of these meals each. On a busy night, the kitchen goes through a thousand whole chickens. Any time after 6, it’s standing room only in there, and you never get your dinner in fewer than thirty minutes after ordering. People pour in and out the doors all night, the bar is busy, the waitresses defy laws of physics, and kids run around screaming while the empty beer bottles pile up on their parents tables.
The whole place is a trip.
After eating we rode back to Fairfield in silence, digesting and listening to disc #3 of Brett’s new Gov’t Mule album, “LIVE… With a Little Help From Our Friends.” We dropped Bo & Joe at their place and headed home ourselves.
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To the growing frustration and annoyance of Microsoft’s management, Apple Computer’s iPod is wildly popular among Microsoft’s workers: Wired News: Hide Your IPod, Here Comes Bill.
I moved more stuff today: my brother’s old band’s site, 2012, is now here on the new server. I moved an old WAV file of me singing. I moved some more gallery stuff. I cleaned up a few broken links.
It’ll take awhile before goblinbox.com is fully functional again, but it’s getting closer all the time.
Got another $10 donation for iowachicksknitting.com today, which makes a total so far of $70. I’ll be signing up for hosting tomorrow and beginning to get that little venture back up off the ground. I’ll probably end up paying for the fucking hosting myself in future years, but it’s a cheaper habit than cocaine so who am I to bitch?
I got a box from Amazon.com! FOUR CDS! (Actually, the Mule album had 4 CDs in it, so it was actually seven new CDs!) Boy am I thrilled! I’ve already fed two albums to my iPod; hopefully I’ll have the restraint to drive home with only one earphone in my head, so I can at least hear if a cop tries to pull me over. Snort! I can’t express how very horny I am to get the FM transmitter for the iPod so I can listen to iPodage thru the Jeep stereo.
Speaking of iPod love, I’m going to be interviewed for a lifestyles piece on Iowans and their iPods in the Des Moines Register. How cute is that? I hope I remember to actually read the article this time.
If you read dooce.com, you probably read the Times article about ‘mommy blogs’ (the phenom of meticulously documenting the perils of parenthood on the Internet) in which she was interviewed.
There are thousands upon thousands of blogs on the web, and I can tell you that most of them (including this one) aren’t worth reading. But in spite of the fact that it’s considered cosmopolitan to believe that everyone (but you and the ten people you dig best) is an idiot, the fact is that I have found a lot of amusement, reassurance, enjoyment, and yea, even solace in many of the blog entries I’ve googled over the past few years.
If you’re going through something, you can damn well bet there’s someone else out there who has got it worse. Depression? Anxiety? Broken heart? Morbidly obese? Pissed off at your husband? Someone out there is battling your demon along with you, and every once in awhile they’re a lot funnier at it than you are.
But the Times article made mommy blogging sound so… petty. So horridly egocentric. So awful. While there was a nod toward the idea that parenting is not one moment of pure joy strung on a string after another, the underlying mood of the article was that mommy blogging is nothing but a symptom of vanity, self-centeredness, and exhibitionism.
The Times article was so negatively blase about human expression that it made me feel… sour. About blogging.
I’ve been doing this for several years, myself. Since before I even knew people were developing software for it. Since I did it in HTML every day. I started at liscoplus.com/mush (defunct) and eventually bought goblinbox.com, and I’m now on my fifth server. I blog because I like to, because people read it, and because I can. (And also to use the web skills I’d taught myself, to make the whole effort of doing that worth the time it took.) I blog because I, like every other human being in the world, want to be heard. I want a chance to say what I have to say. I want to express myself in a medium that doesn’t require me to respond to input as I go.
I want a fucking hobby.
I like that my mother-in-law lurks on my site, and vicariously keeps an eye on her son and his wife. I like having friends drop goblinboxisms into their conversations at bowling alleys and restaurants. I like seeing where my traffic comes from every morning.
Most of the time, my life isn’t blog-worthy. It isn’t interesting, it isn’t intense, and it’s not even particularly amusing to anyone who isn’t me or a member of my clique. But sometimes, the shit does hit the fan, and I do have something worthy of expression. I’m not a professional writer, but I do know that when I get comments from people saying my post has made them cry, I know my expression of the human condition wasn’t fluff.
Most of life is fluff, if you’re lucky, oh New York Times writer. Most of life is nothing but tedious, no-one-cares-but-me details. Maybe putting that stuff on the web is tacky, but if ya don’t like it, don’t read it. And better yet, don’t write condescending articles about it.
I take the point that those heavily-blogged-about kids are gonna grow up, google themselves, and promply puke their guts out. But hell – wouldn’t you rather raise children in a society so rich that you can afford a computer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, electricity, DSL, and enough leisure time to sit down and keep a running journal, and run the risk of (*gasp!*) freakin’ your kid out when s/he reads about the first time they pooped on grandpa’s lap… versus living in a world where “being freaked out” by something you read on the Internet is a LUXURY?!
Fuck it. If I didn’t keep my journal on a web server, I probably wouldn’t keep one at all. I think I’m over my reaction to the insipid nature of blogging even when your life isn’t ‘interesting enough’.
…stuck up Times writer, anyway…
THE ID3-Tag-Editor for MP3s, ID3-TagIT. Fix all those orphaned MP3s on your HDD.
Yesterday I got my Sumajin Smartwrap earphone cord manager and matching Funky earphone pads all the way from Singapore.
I love ’em. They’re adorable. The earphone pads are actually of better quality than the ones that came with my Apple earphones, and the Smartwrap is soft and flexible and I don’t think it will do any damage to the cord.
These products would work equally well for a cellphone headset, btw. Adorable, colorful, functional. Worth the time to order yourself a few sets!
I’ve got 4 new CDs coming from Amazon.com, and an FM transmitter coming from Apple. Soon I’ll be feeding my iPod, and shortly after that I’ll be feeding my iPod to my car stereo. I will be so very rockin’ out during my commutes!
Iowa radio, if you’re not aware, is DISMAL. I never listen to Iowa radio stations any more. I AM SO SICK OF CLASSIC ROCK, OH. MY. GOD. Generally, I listen to NPR. When that gets to be too damned much (Iraq Iraq Iraq Iraq Iraq Iraq IRAQ), I either drive in silence or maybe listen to KHOE (if they’re not playing something completely horrible – I like a little Gandharva Ved every now and again; it is soothing). Sometimes I try a tape, but tapes are sketchy at best. You don’t know if they’re even gonna play, it’s neigh on impossible to drive and locate a specific song at the same time, there’s that horrible dead space at the end of one side, and I don’t want to listen to any of the tapes I have anyway!
I mean, while I do have about 25 cassettes in the console of the Jeep, Brett chose the vast majority of them at various truck stops. While I do dig Johnny Cash, you can only listen to At San Quentin SO MANY TIMES. In my opinion.
Obviously I have a cassette player in the Jeep, not a CD player. I never bothered to install a CD player because many if not most of my CDs are either lost, or in the wrong case (which is pretty much the same as “lost” when you’ve got a couple thousand CD cases – and WHERE IN THE HELL is disc 1 of Back To The Bars already?!??!!), or scratched all to shit from being in Brett’s posession for far too long. He keeps a multitude of CDs in one of those book-style zippered cases in his truck, but his life is unimaginably dusty and dirty. All the CDs in that case are basically frosted, they’re so completely scratched.
But the iPod, oh, the iPod. It’s filling up so nicely. I’m still obsessed with Liars, and I’ve been collecting classic R&B standards with extreme prejudice (Does It Go Round In Circles! It’s Your Thing! Marvin Gaye! The Spinners!), and I’ve got myself a nice disco section, including neo-disco like Jamiroquai, which I dig, and of course all the Earth, Wind, and Fire I can get my hands on (I LITERALLY WORSHIP THE TOWER OF POWER HORN LINE, people. THE LENNY PICKET COCAINE SOLO on Knock Yourself out from Live & In Living Color. Circular fucking breathing! Need I say more?). I’ve even started collecting bootleg MP3s off of the Internet, because while most of them sound pretty shitty, it’s still pretty cool to have them.
I’ve been so non-music for so long that I’m really over-geeking now that I have my own private little universe to fill. The iPod is so trick! I love that I don’t have to take other people’s tastes into consideration; I can totally cheese out to some disco while doing the dishes and no one’s the wiser. I can listen to shit whenever I want, and Brett can still have the TV. I’d probably prefer tunes to TV most of the time, if I had my druthers, but he’s always got control of the TV and by proxy the entertainment center. And if we were spinning a CD rather than watching telly, it would probably NOT be Todd, or disco, or jazz, or funk, or swing, or classical, or baroque, or fusion, or an audio book. It would be, 99.9% of the time, blues. And you know how I feel about the blues.
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On the old server, comments spam was a nightmare. I had MT-Blacklist installed, but it ran pretty slow and it took forever to remove comments spam if I didn’t do it every couple of days or so. Now I can go a long time without even getting any comments spam.
Here’s how you can do it:
1. Move to a server with MySQL.
2. Install MT-Blacklist.
3. Install MTCloseComments and set it to automatically close comments on all posts older than 14 days.
Voil?! Spam-free blogging heaven! By the time the damn bots find your pages, they’re already closed for comments. And the best part is you didn’t even have to do it by hand!
I’m so happy.
Does anybody have any desire to go see Todd Rundgren and Joe Jackson in 2005 at any of these places?
I haven’t seen Todd in forever and I really doubt my husband would be interested enough to travel all the way to Ohio or Illinois or any of the other rather far Midwestern dates! SOMEONE GO WITH ME, GODDAMMIT!
