Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Sick as a dog

Posted by Chris in chris sartinsky, columns, illness, mcmuffin, neo-nazis on the subway, urban cold

I am writing this with my puffy eyes closed, breathing through my chapped lips because my nose is clogged with more debris than a Big Dig tunnel, my ears ringing like the cast of Charlie’s Angels are being interviewed deep inside my ear canal (an old reference, I know, but do you remember these three chattering airheads on the talk shows? The most annoying television I’ve ever seen. Sorry, I’ve been waiting years to get that off my chest) and my head throbbing like — I don’t have the energy to think of a clever way to finish that sentence. In short, I do not feel well. It is something of a milestone: my first semi-debilitating illness in New York (if you want to send me a congratulatory cake to commemorate the achievement, send the editors an e-mail and they’ll give you my address).

There are major differences between the suburban cold and the urban cold. A suburban cold is treated with plenty of fluids and bedrest; the urban cold is treated by staring at your gaunt, pale face in the mirror, popping a few Advil and telling yourself to suck it up. The suburban cold is an opportunity to get under the covers and add or shed layers of clothing until you are perfectly incubated in your own little womb-like cocoon or cocoon-like womb (take your pick); the urban cold is a losing battle between the heat you can’t control and the bitter wind that ices you all over no matter how little you open the window. Basically, the suburban cold is kind of nice, when you think about it, while the urban cold blows big time.

An aside: it is possible that I am confusing “suburban cold” with “childhood cold,” since I — perhaps unavoidably — associate my childhood with my suburban hometown of Burlington and my adulthood with New York (where Boston fits into this I’m not quite sure, since I wasn’t a child there but I sure as hell wasn’t an adult either — and that’s assuming I’m an adult now, which is admittedly a stretch, but one that I hope the reader will grant me for the sake of the thesis). But I don’t think this association is enough to explain all of it, since my mother’s reaction to her own colds is very much in the suburban mold — although, again, it could be because she is only a public school teacher, and so she has luxuries not afforded to more important people like CEOs and firefighters.

Nobody even notices that I’m sick here. Not that I’m asking for pity, or that I want strangers passing on the sidewalk to see the deadness of my eyes and say “oh you’re sick!” and start stroking my hair, but I think someone should notice. Because I sound ridiculous right now, all stuffed up. My consonants all have the same tone — something between b and m — and the vowels are more stretched out than usual, like they’re trying to compensate. So that a simple word like, say, “interpolation” becomes “eimmbbeerrbbmmmaaahbmomb.” Which I hope people notice, because otherwise, that’s what I really sound like. Because I know the voice I hear in my head is different from what comes out of my mouth, with the extra canals it has to pass through and all, so maybe this is what I sound like all the time — sort of like a maybe-gay supervillain holding his nose underwater. Is this my voice? And if it is, how to people resist the urge to hit me every time I open my mouth?

The other nice thing about the suburban cold is that you can easily track down the culprit. A friend or a parent or a brother or sister is always sick before you are, and you can spend the duration of the illness cursing him or her from the comfort of the couch underneath your nicest afghan. I am Strong; I cannot be hobbled by a common cold! I was merely infected by your subversive Weakness! Begone, spread the germs among your fellow peasants and leave the Strong their health! Here, I’ve spent days trying to find someone to blame, and I can’t pin down anyone. Because I went through the names of everyone I work with and everyone I’ve seen recently and I realize that every one of them is or has been sick. The entirely goddamn city is coughing and sneezing on each other and it’s nothing short of a miracle (and a true testament to my hermetic lifestyle) that I made stayed healthy almost halfway through February. Hell, if I spend any significant time here and you can promise me I won’t catch anything more serious than the sniffles on the rolling germ compartments more commonly known as the public subway system, I’d kiss you on the lips.

(A completely unrelated subway story: it was my first month in New York — this might even be back when I was still commuting to the internship from Connecticut — when I was on the subway and a guy with a shaved head, covered with tattoos got on. He was wearing a football jersey and I didn’t think much of him at the time, except that he looked kind of angry, until it was my stop and I got up to leave and he stood up too and faced the door and I saw that the name on the back of his jersey was “NATIONALIST.” Now, this scared me, because I didn’t know what to do-here’s this white supremacist just walking around New York and he’s on the same train as me and I felt like I had a duty as a human being to pick a fight with this guy or at least spit on his shoes or something, but I was also a little late for work and knew this guy could absolutely murder me without even trying, because he was big. So I pretended to have some reason to check my phone — even though we were underground, of course, and my phone is an old chunk of plastic that doesn’t get reception unless I’m clinging to the side of a TV antenna — and I let him get ahead of me. The moral of the story: I am a gutless weenie, and that is not always a bad thing.)

(Plus, what if he was just, like, an actor, or something, walking around in costume? Because what in God’s name is a neo-Nazi doing taking the subway to Soho anyway?)

Back to my cold: it is just a cold, thankfully — this I am sure of. I have had the flu once in my life, and it is not an experience I am eager to repeat (not that I’ve gotten a flu shot since, because I like to live dangerously, and also I am an idiot). Even though this new cold didn’t hit me in an instant like the flu did, I couldn’t help but be a little worried because this one lined up so neatly with the other one: this is my first winter in New York, and the flu was my first winter in Boston. Which was more traumatic, because I have spent four years in a city now, even if it was a smaller city, whereas back then, I was only a few months removed from the backwoods of Connecticut. So it was my first semester of college and I was having all those adjustment problems that come with your first semester of college (only magnified, because my roommate was a nerd and a junior and I didn’t like him and I didn’t have what you would call friends at the time) and then I got just dominated by this flu. Which I saw coming, because my roommate had been wasting away in his bed for two weeks before and I didn’t have a whole lot to leave the room for (again, the whole no friends yet thing), so it was really just a matter of time.

The problem was, I couldn’t do anything about it. Normally, I would have been able to go down to the clinic or take some time off or something, but I just happened to catch this flu during exam week. So the only things I wanted to do were sleep and die (not necessarily in that order) but I had to keep myself awake and aware enough to cram all this stuff into my brain for my first ever college exams. It was a joke, because I was not aware, and I was barely conscious. I shuffled around campus aimlessly. A five-minute walk to the bookstore would become an hour-long ordeal, because I was walking so slowly and I was a little disoriented and all of a sudden I would find myself standing at the bank of the Charles River and I couldn’t really remember how I had gotten there or what my name was. My eyes were closed most of the time and I couldn’t really speak or interact with anyone or do anything, basically, that a person needs to do to survive. Food — all food — became disgusting to me. This was maybe less a side effect of the illness than a moment of clarity because most of the food I ate was in fact disgusting-dining hall food was bad enough, and then exam week is when they start mailing it in and just start digging stuff out of the back of the freezer, so I just bought a lot of fast food. In fact, I was very hungry all the time and I got incredible cravings for certain kinds of food-there was one day that I actually set my alarm to go to McDonald’s because I wanted an Egg McMuffin so badly. And then I would get the stuff back to my room and it’s fast food, obviously, and it was disgusting and greasy and probably the last thing a skinny kid with the flu should be eating, and I realized this as soon as the first drop of deep-fryer grease hit my tongue and I basically just ended up shoving it down my throat as quickly as possible.

It was a nightmare, and studying was worse, because my brain didn’t realize how important this week was and had basically shut itself down when the flu hit. So my eyes were going back and forth across pages and pages of college 101 material and I had all the powers of retention of the lab rat who’s had some part of his brain surgically removed so he keeps going for the pellet of food wired to shock the living daylights out of him every time he touches it. I learned less that week than I’ve learned any other week of my life. And not only that, but I made stupid mistakes. I killed myself studying for Psych 101 because I thought the exam would cover the whole term, when in fact, it didn’t. Which was almost a relief until I got to my science class and realized I had only studied about two weeks’ worth of material, which compromised about 15% of the very cumulative test. I had to poke myself with my pen to keep from falling asleep during the middle of my Italian exam, and then I got such a bad coughing fit that other students started looking at me first with annoyance, and then with genuine concern, like I might die right in front of all of them. And when I handed the last test of that godawful semester to my professor, the only thing he said was not “have a good break,” or “see you in the spring,” but, “are you OK?” I just walked away, because I didn’t understand the language he was speaking. (That was my humanities final and it was an essay test; guess how well I did!)

So in a few days, I am hoping, the fog will lift and I will be back to normal. It’s been a kick in the pants, if anything, because I wanted to take a day off, which made me face the fact that I absolutely couldn’t. According to my calculations, if I take the money I am making right now and subtract rent, that leaves me with a daily budget of approximately negative sixteen dollars (before utilities and other expenses). Which is OK, because I didn’t come here to make money, at least not right off the bat. But things have been going well for me lately, and maybe that could have made me complacent, and the cold has been a convenient little reminder that I have a lot of work to do. In the sense that I can’t really afford to keep this lifestyle up for much longer and that I should enjoy it while I can, and also in the sense that I am very far from where I would like to end up. When I’m a millionaire, I can spend all day under the covers when I don’t feel 100%. For the next few years, at least, it’s Advil for me, and if it gets that bad, maybe I can treat myself to a delicious McMuffin.

Chris Sartinsky is a writer for the Onion News Network and keeps a fine blog of his own. Read his previous 2.0somethings columns here.

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