On the Sunday before the Sunday before Christmas (are you with me?), after a long day of football-watching and beer-drinking, I passed out at ten at night. Then I woke up at one in the morning and couldn’t fall back asleep. So naturally I stayed up and watched DVR-ed episodes of Super Soul Sunday all through the night until skipping my way to the gym with an inexplicable amount of energy at about five. Then I went to work, drank a gallon-ish of coffee, crashed sometime shortly after lunch, and proceeded to watch my health violently deteriorate at a staggering pace over the following two days until I was eventually forced to go to the doctor where I tested positive for strep.
The weird thing is that it wasn’t the sore throat that bothered me so much. It was more so the severe headache that lasted for forty-eight hours and was accompanied by this weird hot and cold sensation that I’ve since been told is what normal people refer to as a “fever.” I apparently hadn’t had one in so many years that I didn’t even realize what the oft-overused term actually referenced, and yes, I realize that this makes me sound about as smart as Jessica Simpson circa the “Chicken or Fish?” Incident of 2003. Totally oblivious, I aggressively blamed my office environment – alternating between the phrases, “Why is it always so fucking freezing in here?!” and, “UM, WHICH ONE OF YOU JOKESTERS TURNED THE HEAT UP TO EIGHTY?” – until a doctor told me that my temperature was 102 degrees. Then everything clicked, and I was like, “Oh. So that’s what that is.”
Though I initially wanted to address my illness with some healing affirmations and health-positive mantras, the doctor was super anti-that. So I listened to her, and as it turns out, drugs are the fucking best. I got some prescription pain meds along with a cycle of penicillin, and by Christmas Eve I was healthy and drunk and joking with my soon-to-be-married brother and his fiancée about how my Best Man speech is likely going to be eighty-percent about me and twenty-percent about them. Or maybe ninety-ten if I end up having an extra shot of whiskey beforehand and decide to be a total self-absorbed dick. Or maybe seventy-twenty-ten (the ten being Mariah Carey) if it goes over three minutes.
And so that’s what I’ve been up to for the past few weeks. Other highlights of my little holiday sabbatical include:
1. Tailgating and watching the last Pats game of the season in the pouring rain, but feeling too happy and tipsy and grateful for life to really give a shit about something as trivial as being soaked and freezing.
Of course we won.
2. Ringing in the New Year up in the Catskill Mountains with some of my best friends, a pool table, and one quality cigar that may or may not have made me throw up later (as per usual when I smoke cigars atop mountains).
And 3. Getting molested by a bear. (An actual bear. Or, rather, a bear-replica. But either way, a bear, the animal. Not to be confused with a large hairy gay man who is likely into sexual accessories of the leather variety – which, for those of you not privy to gay-lingo, is actually a thing.)
Confession: I liked it.
In related news, I’m not making any grandiose resolutions this year, so yay! You’re spared a list. But I will say that the one word I intend to live by in 2014 is this: Simplicity. As in, not making shit unnecessarily complicated for no reason. Can you imagine a whole year of that? I’m pretty excited about it.
So here’s to a healthy, happy, grateful, healing, hilarious, adventurous, just-uncomfortable-enough-for-growth, strep-free, successful, SIMPLE year ahead! I love y’all.
