Creeping Crud Days

Illin'

I hate being ill in the summer. It seems fundamentally unfair. Winter is the perfect time to sit home feeling miserable as it's a miserable time of year already.

It somehow feels comfortable to be ill in the winter. You can close the curtains, turn off the lights, huddle wretchedly over your bowl of condensed chicky-noodle soup and ignore the world, eventually staggering off to the bedroom to pull comfy fluffy blankets over your shivering limbs and take solace gazing at the cold flickering light of the television. No one looks at you strange when you say you have the flu. In fact, people actually expect you to have the flu at some point during the winter. "Have you had the flu yet? There's something going around!" People eagerly await the story of your illness so they can tell you how much worse THEIR bout with the flu was. Because, as we all know, what ails me is always much worse than what ails you... Invariably, before you can get to the part about how you actually had mucus running out of your ears, you'll get interrupted with "Oh, you were lucky! When I had the flu I was so sick the neighbors all chipped in on a tombstone for me," or "That's nothing -- I sneezed so hard my left nostril turned inside-out. See?"

But if you get ill in the summer, it's just not as fun. You can close the curtains and shut the lights off, but a nice warm bowl of chicky-noodle soup just doesn't sound good when it's 95 degrees outside, even if you have the air conditioner on. Snuggling under the blankets doesn't sound good, either. In the summer, all you can do if you're ill is lock the front door to keep the neighbor kids from bothering you, then go lie in a puddle of sweat in the bed and stare miserably at the ceiling, hoping you die before the cat runs out of food and starts in on your tasty corpse. (I hate to say it, but I really wish my little buddy Fruitloop would at least wait until I'm in a feverish coma before he starts staring at me like that... It's creepy.)

Instead of sympathy from friends and co-workers the next day, you get smirks. "Yeah, yeah, sure you had the flu. Which beach did you spend your sick day on, anyway, or were you golfing?" You want to tell them how you were so ill that your eyelids throbbed and turned bright orange, but they just don't believe you.

Being ill in the summer sucks.