Today I am sick. I’ve had the flu for a couple of days, but
the fever has broken and I was eventually driven from the apartment due to a
toilet paper shortage and to wash my sheets that I had sweated on all night.
I also had what my Aussie friend would call “a case of the
Sads.” This is where you’re depressed because things that you thought you would
have had figured out are not turning out the way you had hoped. Career-wise,
that is always the case for me, so I am almost numb to it. This was a boy
related case.
It was made worse because I was sore from the flu and
coughing, alone, in my apartment with NYC-standard-issue uneven heating systems
and watching marathon 30 Rock episodes with our cat. On a Saturday night.
Loneliness rules all.
After getting too cold, I decided that a bath was the only thing
that could fix this. I couldn’t get anyone to come out to Brooklyn to give me a
massage (let alone ever) and I sure as hell wasn’t leaving the apartment again.
Toilet Paper Quest took it out of me.
However, I remembered that baths are incredibly boring. I
brought my laptop in an balanced it on the toilet so I could continue watching,
and turned on the bathroom space-heater, which reminded me of old times in
college with my roommate. (When we had lived together, she refused to let us
turn the heat on until hats had to come out, so I would always do my homework
on the bathroom floor since it was the smallest room in the place. )
After setting up my laptop with my sitcoms, drawing a hot
bath, and cranking up the heat, I also decided I was hungry. I grabbed the only
food I had available- cold taco meat from making taco salads earlier in the week-
and a fork and went off to the bathroom.
Sitting in the tub, chowing down on week old taco meat, a
number of conflicting thoughts crossed my mind: “You have found a way to
coordinate almost all of your favorite things! Warmth, 30 Rock, leftovers, and
solitude. Oh, but you have reached a new level of sadness that you didn’t even
know you had in you. No wonder you’re single. I wonder if this is something the
character Liz Lemon would be doing? You’re taking this show too seriously.… Man,
I hope my roommate doesn’t come home and walk in on this one.”
Luckily, she didn’t. Also, my freezing to death problem was
solved for the meantime and I am now nice and clean and ready to go to bed on
clean sheets. It’s the little things like this that I appreciate. Loneliness
overruled!
