I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more useless in my life. No energy, no drive to do anything, with a vicious head cold that nothing could really assuage, for about five days.
And I had it easy. My wife had it a lot worse, more like two weeks, and she’s still not 100%.
But even that isn’t on the *bad* end of this thing. Lots of people have had it way worse.
We’re back at work now, but we are far from the only people in our schools to contract this thing lately. It’s going around.
A giant inflatable Lego Batman was assaulting the city.
Stomping on cars, picking people up and depositing them (unharmed, he’s not a monster) several blocks away, dragging his rough rubber exterior across the facades of buildings and making a nuisance of himself. When he got to MOMA, it had gone far enough. (I don’t know what MOMA looks like or whether the cityscape this was happening in was anything remotely like where you would find MOMA, but this was a dream, so … you know, logic has no place.)
Luckily, I was there, and I was ready to leap into action. Because I was Batman. Too. Yes, I was Batman too, except I was the real Batman, and I was also Will Smith. So my wife and I (yes, my real wife, because real Batman needs a Real Wife) hopped in the Batmobile which was really just a fancy black Lincoln — real smooth, you know, clean lines, tasteful, refined, not flashy like those other Batmobiles have to be — and, well, getting to the site of the inflatable Lego Batman was a problem because it was during rush hour traffic, and you know how it can be, so it took us a few minutes.
Also, the Batmobile flew, which was fortunate, because the Batmobile had no tires. Somebody had stolen them or something, I dunno.
Anyway, we got to the scene of the crime where inflatable Lego Batman was dragging his body across the front of MOMA and really causing a heck of an inconvenience to everybody and the first thing I did was throw a car at him, which because he’s inflatable and made of rubber didn’t work out so hot; it just kinda came right back at me. What also came back at me was Lego Batman’s mom (looked kinda like Susan Sarandon) with a claim for damages against her son. Yeah, turns out this whole thing was an insurance scam somehow, but screw that lady, I don’t have time for your lawsuits, I have to save MOMA, so I ran over to inflatable Lego Batman with a well-sharpened Batarang (are Batarangs sharp? I dunno. Mine was), sliced inflatable Lego Batman’s feet wide open and he deflated like an old waterbed.
Wife had symptoms at the beginning of the week, felt bad enough to get tested by the end of the week, and last night got her positive diagnosis. Meanwhile, I started feeling … ehh, not great about on Friday, and that’s developed into full-on yuckiness by today.
I got my nostrils roto-rootered out this morning, but that feels like a formality at this point. We have the bug.
And the big surprise about it is not that we have it, but rather how long it took for us to get it. Wife and I both work in schools, which — here in the South — have taken a bit more of a “we’ll take our chances” approach than schools in other parts of the country. Masks are optional. Social distancing is enforced “where possible”, etc.
But we — my wife and I — have tried a little harder than most, I think, to keep ourselves and others around us safe. And now we are forced (by our own sense of conscience more than anything else) to grapple with some tough questions. Who did we see in the past week? Where did we go? Did we really need to do those things? How many people might we have exposed, and how much responsibility do we bear?
This is a lot to think about, and for anxious sorts (like my wife and I — more so my wife than I but I, too), it snowballs pretty quick. So now we’re sitting at home with some unexpected days off, feeling gross because of this bug (though none of us, thankfully, are having any serious symptoms), but also feeling gross out of guilt and worry.
A plague on our house.
I’d love to bring something creative or insightful out of this, but I’m too cloudy-headed to think clearly about it.
Somebody out there is rating my posts (I didn’t even know rating my posts was a thing a reader could do, but there you go). They’ve been marking my posts as 1-star for the last week or so.
Why would they do this?
I have no idea.
What do they hope to accomplish?
Again, I have no idea.
It’d be one thing if there were some other sign: angry comments, disgusting spam, links to a competitor’s website (a website more drively than mine own? Impossible!). But there is nothing.
Just a handful of one-star reviews, floating there on my posts.
Which … okay? I guess you got me, mister (I must assume it’s a mister) one-star-review-leaver.
Or maybe it’s, like, my mom or something, clicking one-star cuz in her mind it’s like giving me a gold star, and that’s good? I dunno. My mom reads the blog; it’s a weird thing I try not to think too much about.
Perhaps the troll will take more aggressive action soon.
The more I write, the more I think about the craft of writing, and the more I think about the craft of writing, the more I think about how badly I screwed up by not thinking about it more when I was just starting.
Of course, when I was just starting, I hadn’t thought about it all that much, so I couldn’t have done otherwise… and yeah, thoughts like that are ultimately pretty useless.
The point of this is that I’ve got this story idea that I’ve been kicking around for a few years now and I’ve just started actually putting words to paper (or, y’know, words to pixels or whatever, you know what I mean) on it, and … I mean, the idea is nifty and all, but… okay, I have to digress further.
With my other stories, it sort of felt like, from the premise, the story just wanted to get up and go. Like the conflict started up and took off immediately, like a cat startled out of slumber by a zucchini squash.
With this one, there’s less of that immediate impulse to action. So it feels like the story needs something. It needs guidance. Or, I dunno, maybe it’s not fully formed yet and it needs more time to incubate.
So I spent my session today doing something I’ve never done — in advance, anyway — for a story: outlining it.
That’s right, I went back to high school and I made an outline.
The outline sucks, it’s vague as heck and it reads like every action / spy / thriller movie you’ve ever heard of, but y’know, it’s an outline. And once I had it down, I started fleshing it out with possibilities.
And man, it’s weird. Because in my other work, I usually don’t plan all that much. I just strap a lead on the story and try to hold on while it rushes off to wherever it’s gonna rush off to. But what I noticed is that, in my other stories, they end up wandering around, feeling lost in the middle.
I don’t want to get lost on this one. So I’m trying something new.
Will it work? I don’t have a clue.
Anyway, here’s another cat gif, because cat gifs are awesome and it’s Friday and that’s awesome.
Welcome. This is my page for sharing projects associated with my coursework in Media and Technology at the University of West Georgia. Assignments will be posted here as they are completed.
Accidentally Inspired 