Sick like Abby Stevenson

Like most people, I have a brain filled with useless knowledge. I have an incredibly random memory, which can recall the lyrics I learned in elementary school to a song about Eli Whitney but not the name of a single person I met yesterday (granted, they all have a minimum of three names, usually ones I’ve never heard of before, but still). I can easily rattle off entire plot lines of Saved by the Bell episodes, tell you about the code I made up to transmit information about the whereabouts of my aunt’s cat when I lived in Edison, and can name almost all the members of any class I’ve ever student taught or been a teacher’s aide in. I’m not particularly proud of these memories, nor am I likely to ever benefit from their knowledge. But it seems as though they’re in my mind to stay; for now, I can only hope that I might somehow begin to spontaneously recall lessons from the Spanish classes I had from continuously from sixth to eleventh grades.

But anyway, I started thinking about all of this because when I started to plan this entry in my head, I knew just exactly to whom I would compare myself when describing my sickness this week. It comes from the largest section of my brain indebted to worthless trivia. Not House storylines (I’ve completely forgotten lots of things that happened from the first two seasons, which I saw in a blur over a two week period), football facts (though I actually actively work on this area of knowledge and it doesn’t end up being worthless, if occasionally impressing guys and even more occasionally being successful at fantasy football count as worthwhile things), nor an ever-growing library of internet memes. On the contrary, my brain has an almost encyclopedic hold on information about a certain group of baby-sitters who live in the fictional Stoneybrook, Connecticut. They were created by the cunning, talented, tireless Ann M. Martin…and her army of ghostwriters, of course.

In case you’re not a twenty or thirty-something year old female nerd, I’m talking about The Baby-Sitters Club, the wildly successful book series I read for way longer than was appropriate. For some reason, when I was thinking bout how to describe how sick I was this week, exact phrases from Mystery #35: Abby and the Notorious Neighbor popped into my head. Since random phrases, characters, events, and ridiculousness from the BSC often finds its way into my thoughts, I didn’t think too much of it. This denial of weirdness on my part is probably helped by the fact that I currently read several frequently updated blogs from authors relatively near my age who still have the BSC obsession. I suppose it’s another area of knowledge I somewhat encourage my understanding of, since I find these blogs incredibly entertaining. They’re constantly reminding me of things I do indeed know – I just needed that tiny bit of jarring about a detail of Claudia’s outfits or a quirk of Mallory’s family to remind me how much more, indeed, I do really recall.

But this is a blog about life in Honduras, sorry, and I’ll try not to forget that. The past two and a half days I’ve been sick. Like Abby in the aforementioned tale, I was just sick enough to not really be able to go out and do stuff, but just not sick enough to not feel justified in that. On Wednesday, I started feeling the symptoms of the onset of a bad cold. I sneezed approximately twenty times in the library during the youth group meeting that wasn’t (as only one member showed up beyond me, Profe, and the librarian), each sneeze rattling my entire body and sending shoots of pain into my ears. Those kinds of sneezes, all in a row. Finally, when it was time to go home, I commiserated with my mom and sister, who were both in their own varying state of gripe, the word here used for a general sickness that could be translated as either cold or flu. It was simply that time of the year, where the slight change in seasons would begin to pass gripe from person to person. Fabulous. I went to bed early, after finishing the book I had started just when I arrived to Cisco.

On Thursday, I woke up feeling worse and decided to skip my run. I laid in bed for the morning, watching Arrested Development and blog-reading. I didn’t feel guilty about going anywhere, since both the school and library were merely preparing for a literary fair the next day and I had already spent a full day at the health center that week. In fact, after a few hours of a lazy morning I didn’t even feel sick anymore. I got dressed somewhat irrationally (in my sick state I was freezing cold, so I originally put on wool socks and sneakers in addition to my long pants and long sleeved shirt; luckily I talked myself down to flip flops with the heavier clothes) and made my way over to lunch at the house of the family whom I mentioned last entry. I managed OK for the walk there and the first hour or so, but after that I was spent. I regretted making it out of my house and then had to endure a long walk back, with my excited and fast moving friends, all the way across town, in my inappropriate attire. I arrived home upset and sweaty, glad that I cancelled my English/Spanish lesson for later with my uncle, and spent the time until dinner in a half-awake nap.

Of course, after that I felt a lot better and ate dinner feeling guilty, thinking I could have had my lesson. And so went the vicious cycle: I’d feel great sitting in my room resting, feel guilty and think I wasn’t that sick, and then go out and feel like death. I explained this to my family the next day, who sort of seemed to understand but also probably thought I was being a wimp. After all, even when they were sick, they had to run their household, with the pulperia, for 12+ hours a day (which involved a lot of work, though not leaving the house). But I soldiered on and attempted to go to the literary fair at the school on Friday morning. If everything would have gone as planned, I probably would have made it. Unfortunately, the show ran nearly two hours late, which I think is extreme even for Honduras. It was also raining, making everything impossible to see or hear, and therefore useless for me to be there, other than to simply show my presence. I was a mess trying to talk to people and physically uncomfortable the entire time. I had also heard back from the PCMO, who encouraged me to stay home, drink lots of fluids, take a cold medicine, and call the emergency number if I got worse this weekend. It was the encouragement I needed to peace out of the fair early and head back to my bed for more adventures of the Bluth family and reading up on the weekend’s football games. By dinnertime, I felt OK again, but this time I knew it was a ruse. I continued to take it easy, cancelled my dinner plans, was grateful for the canceling of a meeting I had intended to go to, and started my latest JP book that I had been saving for a time like this. I again went to bed without setting my alarm.

That brings me to today, Saturday, which I hope will be my final day of rest. I woke up, again, feeling a bit better and thinking I could easily do things today. But instead, I’ve spent the morning reading and watching TV, enjoying my somewhat-sickly day and not feeling guilty. I hope to be fully better by tomorrow and up for the trip down to Senti, where I urgently need to do several things (most importantly, withdraw money from my banking agent). Wish me luck that things might, just a little bit, possibly, for tomorrow only, go as planned!