Because, I mean, that's what you're here for, right? To be my sounding board as I relate my ridiculous antics and high-jinks?
So this is Wednesday last week. I was sick. I was very sick. I got sick over the weekend. It was like my lungs were full of petroleum jelly and my sinus cavities were full of cement. I was hacking up lung butter and oysters the size of rugby balls, much to the wild disgust of anyone nearby. Sleeping was especially hard. For whatever reason, lying flat would exacerbate my spasmadic coughs, which Derek told me "sounded like your lungs were tearing themselves apart."
I made an appointment to go see the Doctor on Wednesday, but the only time they had available was 8:25 in the morning, which I had never personally experienced. I had only heard of it second-hand, like Swedes and the concept of a trusting relationship. I dreaded the idea of waking up at 7:30, but, God almighty, I was a very sick boy.
But that didn't matter. I coughed myself awake at 5:30 and never got back to sleep, what with the coughing and the having to go to the bathroom to spit out mouthfuls of phlegm. I have never been more glamorous. And that is saying something. Derek never woke up. But then again, this is the man who didn't wake up when I got a stomach virus and spent the whole night frantically running back and forth to the toilet vomiting. Derek would sleep through the Rapture.
This gave me about three or four hours of sleep. I got up and saw that it was a cold, wet, rainy day. Usually I would like a day like that, but being that I would have to trudge through this horrible shit to get to the Student Services Building I was somewhat less than enthused. However, I had to get better. I had about four papers due coming up and I had already missed two days of swimming.
This is when it got shitty. Up until now, you have no idea.
I was somewhere in West Campus, trying to avoid the major puddles and swatches of mud, when an incident of mathematical and physical perfection occurred. A tire of a passing car was moving juuuust at the right speed, just at the right angle, and was composed of the perfect texture and consistency to catch a puddle of the thickest, foulest, coldest mud possible and shower me with it from the waist down.
I've heard that when people get shot for a moment they don't even realize what happened. The shock of the impact stuns them so much they go into a daze. This is what happened to me. I was just walking along, when I got a bucketful of freezing natural waste up the ass. My mind spun. I didn't even swear. That was how blasted I was.
I then struggled for several seconds with choice of going back home and changing my pants, or getting to the doctor and getting some drugs in me. I decided I couldn't stop, but I sure as hell couldn't sit around in filthy pants for an hour. I was freezing. I was disgusting. I was sick and mad as hell.
I got to the Co-Op and decided to just buy another pair of pants. Windbreakers, if I could get them. I stopped in a bathroom along the way to scrape off most of the mud so that when I put my pants in my backpack they wouldn't fuck everything up. In doing this I forgot my umbrella in one of the stalls. So I added umbrella to the list, too.
I found both. And they were both a circus-bright shade of burnt orange. The most appalling thing, though, is that the cost of this was 55 fucking dollars. Which I pretty much didn't have except in credit card form, which I try to avoid using. But I did. Sigh.
So I was still sick and wet and slightly poorer. And now I was dressed like an idiot. And I was almost late. I had to burn ass.
On the way, I got a serious fit of the coughs and, in doing so, coughed a contact lens right out of my fucking face. So now I was sick, wet, ripped-off, looking like an idiot, late, and half-blind. I've run through airports half-blind. That was harder, but not by much.
I got there just in time for a bunch of students and faculty to look at me like I had an elephant penis growing out of my chest. They chucked me in a room in the back and then a nice doctor who was so obviously a lesbian gave me a prescription for a suafed-like drug and, thank God, sweet, sweet coedine. I went back to my apartment, tossed my pants in the washing machine, showered, chugged some of it, and drifted away into the luscious hands of medicated sleep.
I woke up two hours later still drugged as hell. I went to class and stared into space and made a few comments that made no grammatical sense.
If you care, I feel better now. No 100%, but since when am I ever at 100%? But that's the worst day I've had in a long time. There have been worse, but those are few and usually involve the justice system in some way or an extremely attractive girl bursting into contemptuous laughter/rolling her eyes at me. At least now I can drug myself.
