work

Sick daze

So I don’t know about you, but I had a kind of a terrible week.

There was that whole kerfuffle on Tuesday, when I missed the Broadway show I had been planning to see, but after that, I thought everything was going to go back to normal.

And then on Friday I got sick.

I woke up that morning a few hours before I normally do, and that’s when the vomiting began. I’ll spare you any more of the graphic details. It’s enough to say that I spent a long and uncomfortable day at home, lying in bed, occasionally turning to Twitter or my work e-mail when I could, trying to sleep when I couldn’t. Later that night my fever spiked at close to 103, but at least by then I was able to hold down enough water to swallow some Tylenol, which seemed to make a big difference.

I’m much better today. The fever’s not gone completely, but it’s in the much more manageable double digits, and I’m actually managing to hold down solid food. (This being toast and rice pudding, all-day-meal of champions.) I even finally took a shower, brushed my teeth, and put my glasses back on. And I’m writing this. Whatever I had isn’t completely gone, but it seems to have done most of its damage in a real hurry.

I’m not doing anything much more adventurous today than eating rice pudding. I’m still lying in bed — new clean sheets, though — and watching episodes of Scandal and Supernatural (both ridiculous in their own charming ways).

The one silver lining in all this — beyond the fact that I am feeling better — is that the team outing I missed on Friday, the lunch and museum visit with my colleagues I missed in favor of retching and sleeping, has been postponed. I was looking forward to that, and I’d have been sorry to have missed it. I’m glad they were able to reschedule it. I would have made lousy company yesterday.

The snow must go on

So today took a hard left turn into suck.

For Christmas, Heather very generously and unexpectedly bought a gift card for Telecharge, which I decided to put towards a Broadway show. Specifically Waiting for Godot, starring Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan, which is running between now and then and end of March and is supposed to be very good. I bought a ticket several weeks ago, and had decided upon tonight. I had my ticket in hand, was traveling light, and eager to see the play.

And then it snowed.

I knew the snow was coming since at least yesterday, but I thought it would start later than it did, and I hoped it wouldn’t be so bad. Then it just kept falling, and the wind picked up, and it got a little difficult and messy to walk outside our office, and then our announced that it was closing early, letting everyone go home if they wanted by 3:30. The MTA was recommending that people not stay in the city if they could help it; if you were traveling on the Long Island Railroad, you were encouraged to do so before the weather got worse and they started suspending service.

I didn’t much feel like getting stuck in Manhattan overnight, getting out of the play around…well, around now, actually, between 9 and 10 o’clock, only to discover that the trains home had stopped. Was I supposed to try and get an overpriced hotel room then? Find someplace open late at night to buy clothes so I’d at least have some clean underwear the next morning? I hated doing it, but I decided, better safe than sorry, and I headed home.

The commute wasn’t all that bad, hardly bad at all, actually. I’ve had better, but I’ve certainly had much worse. It’s still snowing, and they did suspend some service after 8 o’clock, reporting delays on the lines that are still running. But honestly, I don’t know if I made the right decision. I may never really know. It was a judgement call. I’m sorry it lost me the show — and much more the opportunity to make use of the thoughtful gift — but it seemed like the best bad decision to make at the time.

And I have actually seen Patrick Stewart on Broadway once before, so it’s not all bad. (I thought that show was kind of lousy, but I don’t think he or his co-star there were to blame.) There will be other shows and other opportunities and better decisions to be made.

It’s funny, any other day all of this wouldn’t have been so terrible. In fact, it would just be the fun story of how I got to leave work an hour early, which is pretty good, since my hands were starting to cramp up from typing up my conference notes all day. (Eight hours and ten sessions led to a lot of notes.)

I don’t know what the weather or commute will be like tomorrow. At my boss’ recommendation, we all took our computers home with us in case it’s too difficult to get in. Of course, I had to borrow a bag from her having left mine at home. I’d decided not to bring it with me today, because, see, I was going to the theater…

Oh well. Best laid plans and all that. It’s disappointing, but that’s okay.

Friday

It was a long week, thanks in part to the conference that took up my Monday (and the nearly full work day I put in over the weekend to try and make up for that). It was a good week, though, and while the next couple of months still promise to be incredibly busy, I squared away the most immediate and time-sensitive of my deadlines and managed to do some real work.

I also met this morning with the young woman I’ll be mentoring, as part of my job objectives for 2014, who I only got to chat with very briefly at the office holiday party. I’m hoping I can give her some insight into the development process, assuming I have any insights to give, and I think once we’ve settled on a project she can take the lead on that’ll be easier.

I was supposed to go this evening to a “write-in” — basically, the kind of free-writing group I got to every Sunday, only this one with more people, and with a small price tag. My friend Maurice suggested it, but when train troubles prevented him from getting into Manhattan himself, I took it as a sign to take my tired body home and watch episodes of Babylon 5. (I also watched the last How I Met Your Mother episode, but that was really underwhelming.) I haven’t done a lot of writing in 2014 yet, though I’m going to turn my attention back to it this weekend.

I was so happy not to be taking my computer home with me this evening, I can’t even tell you. We’re only two weeks into January, but I’m so glad this is a long weekend. I’m looking forward to not evening thinking about work until Tuesday.

Wednesday

It was incredibly foggy this morning, which surprised me a bit, and a little icy on the ground, which actually surprised me a bit more. I guess it warmed up just enough for yesterday’s rain, then cooled down just enough to slick the sidewalks in invisible ice.

It seemed to be gone this evening, though the fog had rolled back in. Not quite ghost pirate weather, but somewhere in the neighborhood. Frankly, a part of me just wishes winter would let itself be winter again. (This obviously is not the part of me that just a week ago though the earth was trying to kill him with cold.)

Meanwhile, January, or at least this week of it, has marked the return of Year of the Meeting at work. Busy times that aren’t likely to let up until the spring, or at least until I get a few of these books handed over to production.

But I finished the report I’ve been working on, the one that ate up several hours of my weekend, so that’s good.

I also finished reading Jonathan Carroll’s The Bones of the Moon, which was odd in all the sorts of ways you expect a Jonathan Carroll novel to be. I don’t know that I loved it, necessarily, but I found a lot in that I really liked, these (spoiler-free) passages included:

Sometimes dreams bite like fleas and leave little itchy bumps all over your skin.

We want to be loved for what we are, but also for what we want others to think we are.

Our actions and responsibilities are our own: what later returns to either haunt or applaud us is neither possible to predict nor always completely understandable.

How far was a dream allowed to trespass into real life, before it was caught and sent back to its proper place? Could it go haywire and take over everything you knew? Was it permitted to live wherever it wanted? Or had I reached a point where laws and distinctions, rules of the game, had disappeared? A point where everything in my mind, in my life, was up for grabs?

It’s hard convincing yourself that where you are at the moment is your home, an it’s not always where your heart is.

And that’s that.

Publish or perish

I spent the entire day (and some change) attending a conference for work. It was interesting, and offered several different perspectives, but I think have digital-publishing’ed me out for the rest of the evening. I was happy to come home (a couple of trains late) and do nothing more exciting than watch several episodes of Babylon 5. (I’m midway through my re-watch of the third season.)

I took lots of notes so will undoubtedly revisit everything I heard and learned today, but for now I’m just happy to turn the work part of my brain off for a little while.