Wednesday, January 21, 2004
What to Blog When You’re Brain-fried From Fever I am going to write about nothing. I’m pounding my keyboard like hell to make sense of the words that come popping up the monitor screen, my body not quite well-adjusted to movement, or to prolonged concentration. My body has been dormant for much too long, and has known only sleep and more sleep recently. There are no instincts left at its disposal, and the whiteness of the computer screen drills into that semblance of a headache that’s just beneath my forehead, circles the eyes, and punctuates as a kind of throbbing in my throat. I cough to make a point, but nothing really comes out of it, only a dryness of the throat and a persistent thirst. I have been drinking bottles and bottles of mineral water since this thing started, and I have yet to feel sated. It has only made me a constant toilet visitor.
Allen, my editor, has been texting me for my StarLife column since yesterday. “Send story? TY,” he says. I never reply, because I don’t have an ounce of strength to announce I have been taken ill. There are already other responsibilities I have relegated to the sides for the time being: being assistant director for the upcoming college campaign of
Vagina Monologues, writing a review for Rosario Cruz Lucero’s
Feast and Famine: Stories of Negros and Angelo Suarez’s
The Nymph of MTV for the
Philippine Daily Inquirer, editing two books for close friends, and my classes. I have already texted my students what exercises and lessons to finish while their teacher convalesces in the privacy of his Tubod pad. But there is a surge of guilt: I am supposed to be in the classroom with them,
not texting them.
Suddenly, I miss
StarLife’s old Friday deadlines terribly. What to write,
what to write, when you’re brain-fried, and have been a hermit for much too long to even write about anything resembling Dumaguete life? Write of life from the perspective of the sick bed? But there is nothing much there: my half-closed windows take in only the regular rhythm of traffic and the occasional sun. It has just been too hot lately, a heat that pierces the skin. This morning, it rained for a little bit—which is perfectly reflective of the wishy-washy weather, the kind that’s dangerous, our body’s barometer teetering to make sense of the suddenness of hot and cold. Then it finally gives up and plunges to the lows of fever. “A flu’s going around,” M. had told me when we were watching
Captain Barbell only last weekend. He had been fighting a blossoming cough for four days, but I was completely taken by my own robust health. Nothing could stop me from doing what I wanted to do, even belt out the Backstreet Boys songs they play for intermission in Ever Theater. M., on the other hand, simply sat away, cleared his throat occasionally, and sang nothing—
and he happens to love boy band songs.
And now it is my turn to attend to the weary dealings of a sick body.
I haven’t been out of the house for almost three days now. Since Monday night, when I—a trace of oncoming cough irritating the floor of my throat—had unwittingly gone to the gym, found it packed to the rafters and the cardio machine hogged by a long list of people’s names, went straight to attacking the pounds without as much as a stretch of the muscles, and came home a few hours later tired and on the verge of collapsing. By 10 o’clock that Monday evening, I was as hot as a furnace, and my brain fried, teetering on the delirious.
Delirium is like a helter-skelter dream. It makes no sense. Monday night, in the middle of fevered dream, Pop-Eye comes up to me and says, “What it is like, really, to hear people asking you time and again, ‘What are you still doing here?’”—as if
to stay here is the ultimate aberration for my kind. Then the dream becomes philosophical: sometimes what I feel for the question is a puzzle, often it becomes just an irritant the way it comes in waves, and seemingly always timed for that moment when I myself think of my place in the universe and wonder, angst-wise, where does life really lead? Am I living the dream I had when I was a boy? Only the void answers back. I dreamed of being a doctor once—but now here I am, involved in a career I never thought was fitting for me, but which I have come to love surprisingly. One realizes that life as a grown-up eventually becomes the way love goes: you don’t really choose the life you’ll live. Sometimes, life just chooses you. Or, in the words of that brilliant anonymous philosopher: “Sometimes, on the way to your dream, you find another.”
What am I still doing here? Pop Eye goes away to visit Bugs Bunny.
Tuesday, I managed to watch Rebecca Miller’s
Personal Velocity on DVD, and then later called it a night, carefully orchestrating a routine of liquids and Paracetamol pills every four hours. My brother Rey, a nurse, called from Los Angeles and told me to take a bath to combat the temperature. He has been telling me the same thing since he was a student nurse in Silliman. Later, M. made me promise to take 1,000 mg of Vitamin C as soon as I woke up, but not before having breakfast at the corner
karinderia. I say yes to both of them. M. has been so kind and attentive: he refuses to leave my side, does chores around the apartment, and looks after me so well.
I am in love.But I hate the helplessness of being sick. Especially when one happens to live alone, and by and large have to take care of oneself. Being “pleasurably” sick is the province of children: that meant being officially absent from school, and getting all of your mother’s attentions, complete with biscuits,
lugaw, and a bottle of Royal TruOrange. (Why is it always Royal TruOrange?) Adults have to contend with missing vital days at work, and when there is no one to help you set up house, it means having to brave the traffic and the hot sun to buy your liquids and your medicine, or to see your doctor. Yesterday, I braved the four o’clock sun to get myself some mineral water from the corner convenience store. The traffic drowned what was left of my consciousness, and I got home completely drained, feeling faint. Today, I call my mother’s house: “Mom, can you ask Lorgie to please buy me some Tuseran?” (Lorgie is the household help.) And hearing my mother’s old, gentle voice telling me not to worry and to get back to bed and get more rest, I sense my missing of this one childhood comfort, and I could not help, really, but break down in tears—and feeling my tears wash over me like a cleansing, balming flood. And for the first time in days, I feel so much better.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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