Just gonna skip over the back-after-a-long-time spiel. I am shameless now.
The last couple of months have been pretty whirlwind. First work, then some travel and then chicken pox. I am one of those freaks who never had CP as a child. Even when forced to live under the same roof as a sibling who had a full blown case of it a decade and a half back. And boy, has it had its way with me! Not going to relive the horror of it all, but damn, it was pretty scary and nasty and I’m just glad that I’m back to health. 99%. Most of the rest of that 1% is coping with the deafening sound of my crashing ego regarding the I-never-get-sick “thing” I have had. Just never mention it to me again, bro.
So I’ve been under house arrest for over half a month now. That’s meant a lot of TV viewing and Temple Run and other mindless stuff, and basically nothing productive. I also like to wallow in self-loathing and say things like “why me? why now? why this? why like this?” and demand extra care. All in all, I am the fussiest person you could ever have to care for – just short of that awful Sheldon Cooper making Penny sing him that ridiculous poem. Not proud but not embarrassed either, because I know that’s how it is and I can’t change it 😀 The only good thing that came out of this sickness, therefore, is the fact that my husband sort of gave up having to do all the fussing alone and sought my mom’s help and I got to spend 10 days with her after a very long time. On another note, I don’t think she is ever visiting me again when I am sick. Well, win some lose some, right? Right.
I have realized that some times we are put in situations coming out of which makes us feel grown up in a very short time. Thinking back, it always happens like this. One of the realizations of this growing up has been knowing that even though we pretend otherwise, we are not really in charge of our lives. In our script of our next few days or weeks or months, “this” is always going to be “such a bad time to be sick”, but what’re you gonna do because it’s not up to you. You’re always going to be dying to get back to whatever it is you think you ought to be doing, but viruses don’t play by rule-books. In a funny, heavily medicated and poxy state, all this seemed rather humbling. We make it look like going with the flow is a choice we make, when it’s the only way everything is actually happening.
Some of the telling signs of having grown up is that I missed only all the boring things in the last few days. Y’know – work, workouts and shopping. Work because I was feeling really good about it just when I fell ill, and I do think that I am going to take some time getting back in the groove. Workouts because I am terribly disappointed about how much this will have set me back in the gym. I am really really slow at any progress with my cardio, and I just know that it’s not going to be easy even getting where I already was. Shopping because I am out of so many things that I need and because I have missed out on some of the good sales and well, because I had my eye on so many things that are likely gone by now 😦
There’s another thing I wanted to write about, today. In all this staying home and not being able to do much, I have subjected myself to an inordinate amount of social networking in the last few days. No, not excessive tweeting or blogging or facebooking, but just observing trends and discussions and virtual personalities. Let me just say that without the commensurate amount of alcohol in your system, it is not a very healthy exercise. It could be my disillusionment with the world at large, but I’m starting to feel that the online world is a bit of a two-dimensional matrix. The black-and-white opinions, the hyperbole, the lack of decency and space for debate, the presumed ownership of platforms, crass jokes making people short-term celebs and many other things have made it tiresome. I feel no inclination to engage in conversations beyond emails these days. I do not mean to seem holier than thou when I say this, because I’m sure someone could be finding me equally tiresome on the internet. But I do believe that the time has come for me to step back from it. I just need to decide between all these various media and stick with one that allows me to air my anyway-infrequent thoughts. Will decide on that soon.
In other news, it’s less than a month to my 29th birthday. Or, as I am starting to look at it, less than 13 months to my 30th 😀 I’m strangely looking forward to it. Yay!