Scenes from a Sick Day

I've had a cold this week. It's been stronger than most of my colds are, and fighting my way through the school day had become enough of a challenge by Thursday that I decided to take a sick day on Friday and stay home to rest over a self-awarded long weekend. I've never taken a lot of sick days; in fact, I can't remember the last time I did. The sad truth is that getting plans ready and turning things over to a substitute can be as much of an inconvenience as just showing up and being uncomfortable, but when I happened to cross paths with one of my go-to subs during the day I took it as a sign.

You know how your brain doesn't quite work normally when you're sick? When your thoughts drift into the realm of the surreal and nonsensical? I've experienced a good amount of that in the past 24 hours. So just in case there is anyone out there from my school life who thought I was playing hooky to go off to the movies or something (which would be worthy of suspicion next weekend, because, Avengers), here's what my day of Cold Brain was like:

*"Oh crap I just left the house and I don't have a pocketful of emergency tissues or my Burt's Bees lip balm so I don't know if it's worth going into the grocery store or not even though I really need to stock up on the Diet Mountain Dew I'll be relying on for momentary consciousness this weekend..." I followed up this thought by sitting in the car an extra two minutes to plan out the most efficient possible route through the grocery store, making sure I didn't go above the fifteen items that would keep me out of the express lane.

*"How long have I been sitting in front of the TV without realizing Wheel of Fortune is on? I don't watch this!! But...the remote...way over on that other table...oh, hell. FINE."

*"Now my head feels much less like it's full of cotton candy and much more like it's full of drunken moths."

*"Whatever happened to that Chuckwagon Dog Food, with the commercial that had that little wagon that went around the dog's legs at the end?"

*"I wonder if there's anyone I could talk into bringing me some food I like and then just going away so I don't have to use the energy it would take to talk to them."

*"I'll bet Thor never gets sick. But Loki probably does."

*"I love blankets. They are indeed my good, good friends."

*"Oh, my. That was disgusting."

*"It's stupid and gray and cloudy and outside. How does the weather know how I feel?"

*"Cheez-Its are the greatest."

*I had a dream that a kid was asking me if he could go to the bathroom, then I rolled over and looked at the alarm clock and saw that it was pretty close to the time that same kid would usually be asking me if he could go to the bathroom in real life. It gave me a chill.

*"Does my tongue always look this weird?"

*"Why would someone write my name in spray cheese but spell it wrong?" (I was falling asleep at this point. I cannot begin to imagine the dreamlike context from which this originated.)

*I fell asleep with one of Jim Gaffigan's albums playing, and I had a moment of panic that I needed to come up with new material...then remembered I'm not a comedian.

*"Wait, what?! HOGAN'S HEROES RERUNS?!?!! This almost makes me want to get out of bed so I don't fall asleep while they're on."

Almost....