I stayed home from school today, sick. Just like when I was younger, my mom made me feel guilty for even considering staying home. That is one thing that I do not miss about living in a different country from my mom. I fully thought through the situation, before deciding anything – if I had had anyone else feeling as I felt this morning, I would have wanted the person to stay home (and also stay away from me). This was not about disliking my work, as it has been in the past at times. I was genuinely sick (and still am).
My mom doesn’t get sick very often, and only has a sort of slight cold, whenever she does get sick. But she gets to sleep. I used to be like that, rarely getting sick, and having it be mild, just requiring water and a single night’s sleep to rid myself of it. But working life stole my long nights of sleep and weekends of rest, and traded stress and distaste for them. I clearly am not a fan of the trade – I now get sick regularly, though mostly just when it’s cold out.
So, today, I stayed home, sick. I handled what I needed for work, gargled some warm salt water, and then went back to sleep. I woke up once, in desperate need of a potty break, and then downed some more water, and went back to sleep. I didn’t really get up until my second potty break awakening, and, even then, I only got up, because it was 1:30pm, not because I felt ready to get up.
Now, late at night, I am hardly able to stay awake to accomplish my bedtime goals, despite my sleep from last night. I am only awake this late anyway, because my mom and I agreed to watch a film together, and it was pushed back, and then paused and rewound so many times, that our initial ending time of 9:30pm was much later.
Anyway, the whole point of this is that 1) I need more sleep in my daily life (or nightly, I suppose), 2) I really enjoyed spending the day working on some writing (that’s what I did, once I was awake and having tea), and 3) I found today ironic. While I was in Japan, all alone so often, including when I was sick, and just longing to have someone be with me, like it had been back in the USA, I had longed to have someone spend time with me and take care of me when I was feeling poorly, and expected to find that once back in the US. But I was all alone today, on my first sick day in the USA. And I really got to be alone with my thoughts, which was useful and somewhat frightening. I have much more to consider in my life right now, and today helped me to see some unique parts of it all.
A fun final piece of my illness today, is that I discovered it surprisingly satisfying to eat the heads of Darth Vader and the Clones in my Star Wars SpaghettiOs. I haven’t had SpaghettiOs in years, but this was a fun one to have, especially for being sick.
Post-a-day 2017
hannah ananas 