Sick and Tired

Current location: Kenmore, WA, USA

Reading: Slaying the Dragon by Ben Riggs

Listening: Spiro World by Time Wharp

(if you have a moment, reply with your own 3-item status)

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Sick and Tired

I've been in Seattle, visiting family and pet-sitting, for a week.

I've been sick for nearly the same duration.

I had a few days of relative normalcy and then—immediately after driving back from the dock where I dropped my sister, brother-in-law, baby nephew, and parents off to board a sideways skyscraper-scale ship for a seven-day cruise—WHAM, I nearly collapsed with exhaustion.

My brain was cloudy, my focus nonexistent.

I was congested, it hurt to swallow. I could barely grunt, much less speak. Breathing was possible, but seemed increasingly inadvisable.

The next several days were a bit of a (painful) blur.

I only really got out of bed because the cats I'm pet-sitting harass me if I fail to feed them on time (which in some cases, by their reckoning, is 4am), and the dog, who's blind, deaf, can't smell very well, and also my responsibility requires eyedrops throughout the day. So while she isn't capable of climbing the stairs to push me out of bed (aided by the cats), I knew she needed those meds, so my (foggy) sense of dog-duty nudged my clogged and frazzled body through my fur-baby-related daily tasks and (sluggishly, achingly) through my more standard, work-oriented weekly rhythms

The first morning I woke up without pain and with a relatively well-functioning brain was borderline magical, despite the persistent tiredness and congestion, and my increasingly runny nose.

I'm now on day five of full-on sickness, and I still feel like I've been hit by a small train, but the worst of the overt symptoms have passed.

I'm still not sure what I've been suffering through (two negative Covid tests suggest it's an early winter flu or cold, but Omicron-era Covid is supposedly better at dodging those at-home tests, so the big C remains a possibility) but I'm hopeful my contagious period will be behind me by the time my family returns from their voyage.

As far as I know, I've dodged Covid, thus far. Mostly, I suspect, because I'm able to work from home and have been careful with the social risks I've taken.

I've been lucky most of my life though, too, illness-wise.

I've had bad allergies as far back as I can remember, but I've got meds (which work okay) for those, and I've never broken a bone, haven't suffered from any chronic conditions, and though I've recently had some jaw issues and was diagnosed with Hashimoto's (an autoimmune disorder), I'm learning to manage the former, and the lowest-possible dose of synthetic thyroid hormone (a cheap and widely available medication) seems to be keeping the latter in check.

All of which is to say, I'm still thrown off a bit any time I get well and truly sick because I'm generally pretty fortunate in that regard: I'm not knocked-flat by disease with any real frequency or intensity, and I've been in a position to handle or learn to manage the stuff that has cropped up.

Consequently, I try to use these moments of real-deal sickness to gain perspective, both in the moment—taking stock of how I function (or fail to) when in near-constant pain and packed to the brim with uncomfortable and brain-clouding fluids—and afterward: appreciating what it's like to feel "normal" again, in the sense that I'm not in pain and my brain is working like it usually does.

I'm not heightened in any way, but because that previous baseline (which I failed to appreciate) feels so elevated compared to where I've been for about week, everything at something close to my normal functionality seems shinier and latently happiness-inducing.

This sense of perspective also reminds me of the struggle so many people face on a daily basis because of chronic conditions they're unable to shake for one reason or another.

I imagine anything can become normal with time, as we humans are good at adjusting our sense of what's tolerable and expected when we have to.

But it does seem like a significant number of people are managing to dance roughly the same choreography as everyone else, despite having to perform with weights around their ankles, blindfolds over their eyes, and headphones blasting different music duct-taped over their ears.

Which is impressive, but also unfortunate.

And this is something that, for me at least, is easy to understand intellectually but not necessarily feel, intuitively and persistently, until I attempt to do the same for even just a matter of days.

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Truman and Oscar, who follow me around all day while trying to play it off like they don't care and don't even realize I'm there (but who then meow for food and butt-scratches when I don't pay them enough attention).

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Things I've Made This Week

Select, recent works from across my project portfolio.

Aspiring Generalist: Mimetic Traps

Brain Lenses: Legalese (podcast)

Climate Happenings: Patagonia Owner Gives Away Company

I Will Read To You: River Roads (podcast)

Let’s Know Things: Frontier Mining (podcast)

Curiosity Weekly / Daily: September 20 / September 20

One Sentence News: September 21 (podcast)

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Interesting & Useful

Things Come Apart — www.toddmclellan.com Project of disassembled objects shown in detail in a flat lay. Once laid out, the pieces were thrown through the air.

The Big [Censored] Theory — pudding.cool A case study on how the government censors TV in China.

How Long Do Animals Sleep? — blog.datawrapper.de I knew that bats were nocturnal, but what I didn’t know was that they spend the majority of their time sleeping.

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Scarlet, a Very Good Dog who can't hear or smell or see very well, can regularly be found staring/listening intently at nothing for long periods of time.

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Outro

I had so many plans for my time here in Seattle, and thus far I've followed through with precisely none of them.

I'm hoping that changes in the next few days, but we'll see. In either case, I should be back on a flight to Milwaukee when next week's newsletter goes out, at which point I'll report in on what I've managed to salvage from the wreckage of my West Coast intentions.

(Also: I'll hopefully avoid picking up another illness on the flight back! Wish me luck.)

How're you feeling at the moment? Dealing or recently dealt with any colds, flus, or Covids? Planning any trips, or hunkering down? I respond to every email I receive and would love to hear from you :) You can reach me by replying to this newsletter or by writing to colin@exilelifestyle.com.

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