A Road Less Travelled

Allow me to tell you about my weekend. Seth and Crystal were going out of town to a small, indie game designer’s convention. It was a combination networking opportunity and birthday present for Crystal. She was looking forward to it, Seth was looking forward to it and I really didn’t mind the idea of babysitting the children. I mean, what’s two days, right? Then I got sick.

It was the sort of cold that tricks you right at first and makes you think it is merely a cold. Then, about a day after you have diagnosed the problem as “Common Cold”, the full degree of illness pounces on you from behind a potted plant, wrestles you to the ground and reveals itself as “The Truly Yucky Cold”. I think it laughs gleefully, too. It’s the sort of cold that requires you to inject your current “Get Out Of Bed And Start The Day” pep talk with a shot of espresso before you can stagger out of bed and into a hot, hot shower. The hot shower is necessary to rid your body of the effects of sleeping with a cold. ‘Shame on you,’ your cold seems to say, ‘You slept. Now I will punish you!’ You shower to purge your body of the punishment and then you must go lie down to recover from the shower.

After you’ve flopped on the sofa for a while you think maybe you could be in the mood for some food if someone would only bring it to you, cut it into bite sized pieces and feed you so you don’t have to do more that chew. If they could swallow for you too that would great because right now there is a knife in your throat and every time you swallow you stab yourself forcefully with it. Since you are against self-mutilation you decide not to swallow so you stay on the couch and wait for your official swallowers to come. Sadly, they never do. And your food never comes because while the children are proficient at preparing breakfast for themselves you are pretty sure that a bowl of cereal with rich, creamy milk is not what the doctor ordered. You think perhaps you could get up and make your own food, something less milky, if you could simply stop stabbing yourself in the throat with a knife and if whoever was sitting on your sinuses would get off.

A thought springs into your head. In the kitchen, a mere three thousand miles away, is a bottle of Ibuprofen. This bottle has the power to remove the knife that you keep sticking yourself with. You are so excited by this thought that you would dance with glee if you could manage to get up, but there is a catch. There is always a catch. Ibuprofen, you have been taught, is hard on the stomach and you must have food in your stomach before you can take it. But, you whimper, how am I supposed to make food before I have the Ibuprofen? Your plan was to bask in the Ibuprofen before you made your food and tried to force it past the knife in your throat, but the Cold knows this. It is canny and cunning and doubtless it is smarter than you. You would weep quietly in defeat, but you have no idea what that would do to the precariously balanced level of not-pain you have established there on the sofa.

And so the day goes. The children are lovely to you and only require the smallest bit of work and love from you. The church folk are lovely to you and ask what they can do to help and refuse to believe you when you say you’re not sure you need help other than a knife-removal surgery. The only thing not lovely to you is the Truly Yucky, Nasty, No-Good, Bad-Bad Cold which breaks down your defenses and invites his good friend Pink Eye over to play. The rest of your weekend proceeds apace, but with tea bags on your eyes.