Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Ill. Advised.

I hate being sick.

I'm pretty sure it, like all substantial psychological issues, stems back to my childhood. I recall getting the chicken pox in kindergarten, just after my third-grade brother got over his bout of the itchy spots. He had just over ten spots, which is commonly seen as the bare minimum to guarantee you won't get them ever again. I had them all over my body. It was not the first stroke of poor luck against my grossly malnourished immune system--the myriad ear infections I suffered as a toddler, which necessitated an early myringotomy, come to mind--and it most certainly would not be the last.

Next came the flu in second grade. Then came countless incidents of strep throat, which have scarred me enough that any time I have a sore throat (as I do now, for instance) I immediately pull out the flashlight and check to see if there are spots of white along with the red discoloration in the back of my mouth. Factor in the fact that the vicious spasms of stomach flu never lasted the requisite twenty-four hours but would strike me for a minimum of three days of violent gastrointestinal distress, and perhaps you can begin to understand why the prospect of getting sick fills me with dread.

Of course, if there has been any upside to a childhood filled with viruses and diseases, it's that my once-feeble immune system has proven itself to be quite a champion in recent memory. I've managed to go through long stretches without illness, which has been a blessing, but the coinciding downside has been that the illnesses I do get tend to be pretty intense, even if they are as simple as head colds--as is the case with the cold I'm suffering from right now. They are also characterized by an awful sense of timing, kicking in during such inopportune occasions as, say, the week of the actual performances of the plays and musicals I acted in during middle and high schools.
(True story: I was ill for at least one night in seven of the eight performances I participated in, most often with--you guessed it--strep or sore throat. And the one show I was healthy for, 2006's Godspell, I ended up spraining my ankle during the first act of the last performance and, while I completed the show, I couldn't walk without crutches for two weeks afterwards.)
So here I am, less than a week removed from a lovely trip to Walt Disney World, with at least two posts in my to-be-blogged backlog (backblog, perhaps?), and I'm instead lounging on the recliner--because my room is too damn warm and I may or may not have a bit of a fever--bitching to my surely dwindling readership about how under the weather I am. Awesome.

The problem with my present illness is that, for the first time in a long time, I once more have reason to engage in unabashedly optimistic thinking. On Monday, when I first started coming down with the sniffles, I was faced with a difficult job-related decision. It wasn't an optimal situation for me because it was far from full-time employment, and that was what I was seeking. I was debating how best to approach this when I received another e-mail on Tuesday--this day, more sick, but, as my Twitter indicated, not so sick that I couldn't play eighteen holes--indicating that a full-time position had opened up, if I was interested in it. Naturally, I was, and today--full blown feeling-like-shit, the kind of feeling-like-shit that had me in the recliner almost all day--I received another e-mail telling me I could come in on Friday for an interview.

Before this much more ideal opportunity presented itself, the former was very much worth wrestling with, particularly given my inability to get much more of a lead from anywhere else. As many of my friends and former colleagues have been lamenting, the job market has been horrendous, no matter how much the pundits have been claiming that the economy is, at long last, climbing out of the crapper. It was very difficult to simply say no to an offer just because it wasn't "perfect," no matter how much it may have been, as my parents wisely noted, a stepping stone to something better.

But what I've been realizing as I've had the time to reflect today is that the very significant changes I've been promising myself haven't quite happened yet--and that's perfectly fine. None of the things that I'm looking for are going to happen overnight: I'm not going to finish my novel or screenplay tonight, I won't be rail thin tomorrow, and I'm not going to be making the big money bucks at a job next week. Change, as much as it may pain me, is a process, not an occurrence, and this is why I think so many people tend to fear it. I think we all have particular idealizations of what we'd like things to be like, but we get frustrated by the fact that it is going to take not just work but prolonged, consistent work to get there.

Is constant fluctuation the ideal situation to be in? Of course not. But neither is stagnation when one's present situation is dissatisfying. And the way I see it, things aren't going too badly right now: I've finally got myself a viable possible job opportunity; despite certain disagreements I've had with fitness-related video games lately, I'm losing weight at a slow, steady pace; and my writing projects are still proceeding, even if they are doing so at a slower rate than I'd like. The change I wish to see in myself isn't going to just happen all at once, but I'm finally starting to see myself embodying the act of changing. And if that leads me to the things I'm really dreaming of, that just may be the real cure to my ills.

1 Comments:

Blogger DLagace said...

Congratulations on the interview...call me this weekend with details. Til then, I'm swamped here at work anyway

9/23/2009 07:43:00 PM  

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