Sick of being sick

I haven’t abandoned the blog again already, I’ve just been varying degrees of ill over the past three weeks. And not the fun Beastie Boys kind of ill, just the lame old sick kind.

It all started on the train three Mondays ago. I forgot my mask and of course that meant that the person behind me was sneezing and coughing continuously throughout my entire commute. By the time I got to work, I was pretty sure I had picked up some form of plague.

That suspicion was confirmed as my condition deteriorated throughout the day. I did go to the Giants game that night, but felt like total crap by the time I made it home. For the next six days, I did nothing but languish in bed or on the couch, drifting in and out of consciousness with a cool washcloth on my head, twenty pounds of unsympathetic chihuahuas in my lap, and far more than the recommended dosage of Nyquil pumping through my system.¹At one point, I believe my blood type changed from O- to purple drank. I even willingly skipped the next two ball games, so you know I was feeling pretty damn bad.

During most of this, The Wife was in Mexico on a long-planned trip with her friends. I didn’t want to ruin it for her—and there wasn’t really anything she could have done if she had been here anyway—so I tried my best to not let on how badly things were going up here north of the border. I think I mostly succeeded.

By the time she returned, I had moved out of the worst of it and into the second phase of non-stop coughing, headache, runny nose, weird ear pain, muscle tightness, and disturbing amounts of postnasal drip.²Seriously, I do not understand how the human body can produce so much mucus. Where does it all come from? How is the creation of this much snot compatible with the law of conservation of mass? I worked from home that second week, but there was still a fair amount of languishing going on. I made it back into the office last week with a minimal amount of languishing.

I’m finally getting back to normal³Well, relatively. I’m sure I’m still quite abnormal on many fronts. now, but the cough is still there and I wake up in the morning with a mild sore throat thanks to all that postnasal drip. I guess this is what getting a cold is like once you reach middle age. Or perhaps this is the beginning of the inescapable gradual physical decline that will culminate in my eventual death. Eh. Circle of life and all that.

In any case, the lesson here is never go anywhere where other people and their grody germs might be. Just stay at home covered in chihuahuas.

Making daytime television great again

Since I’ve been at home a lot over the past few weeks, I’ve had plenty of time to sample the sad, dreary landscape of daytime television. You’d think that having 500 channels would result in at least one decent thing being aired while the sun shines, but it just means there’s more room for infomercials and game show reruns.⁴I guess I missed the memo, but soap operas and judge shows seem to have mostly disappeared.

At some point, I turned over to CNN and got hooked on coverage of the current Trump trial.⁵A series with that will soon have more installments than the Fast and Furious franchise. It’s not really the trial itself that I find fascinating—it is what it is—but rather the mechanics of how it is being covered.

Since cameras aren’t allowed in the courtroom, news sites and TV networks have resorted to running tickers and live blogs with social-media like updates popping up every few minutes. As these snippets roll in from the courtroom, cadres of experts⁶Or “experts.” try to decipher and analyze what’s going on. It reminds me a lot of the Playograph displays they used to have in major cities so people could “watch” baseball games before radio and television came on the scene. I think it’s funny that we’re basically doing the same thing here in the 21st century.

Also, last Thursday’s testimony gave us this, which I think we can all agree is infinitely better than Andy Griffith reruns and Sarah McLachlan singing sad songs about dogs:

I don’t have video of it, but on the same day Anderson Cooper kept stumbling over his words and got stuck in this weird loop where he said the word “horny” about a dozen times in the span of 30 seconds. I like to think that Wolf Blitzer was sitting just off-camera, taking a shot of Fireball every time Anderson said it.

These are truly wondrous times we live in.

No, we cannot have nice things

During Saturday’s Giants game, a pelican landed on the field during the fifth inning and hung out for a while before eventually taking off. The crowd enjoyed it, the TV announcers got a kick out of it, and it seemed like a nice warm fuzzy moment for all involved. I even noted it in my scorebook.⁷Apparently Saturday was “Random Animals on the Field Day” because a turtle stopped a minor league game in Florida as well.

But just like everything else about the Giants’ season so far this year, something that seemed good at first was actually a harbinger of suffering and death. So…that sucks.

I choose to believe that this particular pelican is happy and healthy and just likes hanging out at the ballpark.

Last night at the ballpark

No pelican drop-ins last night, but we did have some suffering as the extremely mid⁸My daughter says I’m using this correctly. Giants began a three-game series against the sharknado known as the Los Angeles Dodgers. Seriously, these guys make the 1992 Springfield Nuclear Power Plant softball team look like…well, a regular beer league softball team.

Surprisingly, the Giants remained competitive in this one and even managed to hold a lead for a good chunk of the game. In the end though, their young, rookie-laden roster committed rookie fielding, pitching, and base running mistakes in the later innings that squandered any chance they had to pad their lead and kept the Dodgers in the hunt.

You can’t do that with an opponent like the L.A. Sharknado. It took them an extra inning to finish it off, but the Dodgers did what good teams do and capitalized on all those miscues.

It’s a game that the Giants should have won, but that’s not what mid teams do. Instead, they jump out to early leads and then park a water tanker filled with sharks directly underneath a tornado to ensure their easily avoidable yet totally inevitable demise.

• 1
  At one point, I believe my blood type changed from O- to purple drank.
• 2
  Seriously, I do not understand how the human body can produce so much mucus. Where does it all come from? How is the creation of this much snot compatible with the law of conservation of mass?
• 3
  Well, relatively. I’m sure I’m still quite abnormal on many fronts.
• 4
  I guess I missed the memo, but soap operas and judge shows seem to have mostly disappeared.
• 5
  A series with that will soon have more installments than the Fast and Furious franchise.
• 6
  Or “experts.”
• 7
  Apparently Saturday was “Random Animals on the Field Day” because a turtle stopped a minor league game in Florida as well.
• 8
  My daughter says I’m using this correctly.