micah holmquist's irregular thoughts and links |
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Welcome to the musings and notes of a Cadillac, Michigan based writer named Micah Holmquist, who is bothered by his own sarcasm. Please send him email at micahth@chartermi.net. Holmquist's full archives are listed here.
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Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution) Aljazeera.Net English Blogs that for one reason or another Holmquist would like to read on at least something of a regular basis (always in development) Thivai Abhor |
Friday, January 03, 2003
Sickness used to be a lot more fun I have some fond memories of being sick when I was younger. Sure there was the unpleasantness of an illness but I usually got sick during the school year and that meant not only missing school but also having one or two days when I my mom said I wasn’t well enough to go to school but I was in fine form to play. In kindergarten I came down with chickenpox and for a number of days –I have no idea how many- I didn’t feel like doing anything but laying in bed. Then finally a day came where I felt well enough that I wanted to get out of bed, as opposed to being forced out to see a doctor or something, so I got up and told my mom who responded that this was good but that I was still too sick to go to school. Not knowing the protocol and wondering if I was supposed to still spend all day in bed, I asked her if it was o.k. if I played. She said it was and I spent a few delightful hours with my cherished Playmobil Castle. And it seemed liked I would come down with Tonsillitis twice a year and have to miss a week of school until I got my tonsils out in the spring of 1989, when I was completing fifth grade. The first two days I would be really sick. I would start to feel better by Wednesday. By Thursday evening I was doing great but my parents still said I would stay home, which meant that I had a full day off from school where I was in great shape to play inside and read. As I got older I got sick less often and didn’t seem to get the benefit of the days when I felt fine but still didn’t have to go about my “job.” That certainly has been my experience over the last few days. I woke up New Year’s Eve and felt like I was coming down with a cold but decided to plow ahead as if there was no problem. By two or three in the afternoon I was feeling fine and thinking I had beat it. Then around 8:30 it hit me and I realized I was going to be sick. I went to a nearby grocery store to get some cold medicine. By my count, they had 7 different medications on the shelf that were labeled “NON-DROWSY” but none without that label. I asking a stocker if they had any that weren’t “NON-DROWSY.” His first response was to point to one that said, “SAME STRENGTH AS REGULAR COLD MEDICINE.” I felt like saying “I want drowsiness along with a cured cold like the average hawkish warblogger wants destabilization of the Middle East with an escalation of the war on Iraq,” but I held back and simply asked him if could check in back for any cold medicine that wasn’t labeled “NON-DROWSY.” He did and quickly brought me some medicine that fit my specifications. I headed home after that, put on some warm sleeping clothes, took the medicine, started playing Ballads by the John Coltrane Quartet and snuggled up with Fred on the couch. With a little less than ten minutes to midnight my dad woke me up and asked if I wanted to watch the ball drop on t.v. I said yes and groggily enjoyed the festivities before heading off to bed with less than two minutes after midnight and the start of 2003. As I crawled in to my warm and comforting bed I heard the Baghdad moments –more commonly known as fireworks- that had been scheduled to off over lake Cadillac. How lucky I am to know that those are not bombs, I thought I at the time. Americans have an interesting relationship with fireworks as made clear by the recent jingoistic Toby Keith song “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” where the singer presumably tells Afghans –each and every one of whom is a big fan of American country music- that the U.S. bombing campaign was a situation where “…we lit up your world like the fourth of July.” Is this recognizing that fireworks were originally intended to look like warfare or does it show that Americans have all but forgotten that fact and now see the U.S. bombing another country and think it look a lot like the fireworks they enjoy? It my prediction that terrorism in the U.S. and against U.S. targets outside of the country will become more frequent in the next few years. If this happens, I wonder if Americans will tend to shy away from fireworks because it the images hit to close to home of if instead they will cling to watching fireworks as a daring act in the fight for freedom. After eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, I awoke New Year’s Day feeling very sick and not into doing much. Since then I’ve spent most of my awake time doing engaged in enjoyable pursuits like drinking freshly squeezed orange juice, reading Christmas books and watching the Citizen Kane, The Searchers and Taxi Driver DVDs that my mom gave me for Christmas. Still I haven’t felt well at all till this morning when I realized that I had to get back to some tasks on my symbolic plate now that I felt better. The days of feeling-fine-but-not-having-to-do-work-because-I-was-recently-sick look quite good right about now. I’m still not at 100%, let alone the 103% level that I try to spend no less than 61.8% of my life living at, but I’m doing better and there are things to do. It will probably take me a bit to get caught up on this blog. Traffic to mth.blogspot.com has actually been above normal due to links from Lisa English, Glovefox, Jim Henley and Benjamin Kepple. I need to respond to Kepple in the next few days but right now I have other things to do. Say, where is that castle? |