One of the undeniable oddities of work and school life is that we absolutely love to get sick. We watch our weight, what we eat, we may exercise, and go through physicals to preempt serious medical conditions. We get asked what like to do and invariably one of the things many of us say is, “I love to work out.” But despite of all this, the thought of a mild sickness jolts the all the pleasure centers in our brain like the thought of cookie dough ice cream we promised ourselves after a spinning class.
Diseases mean discomfort, pills, weakness, aching, and these days thoughts of genetic mutations of pigs. But once we hit school age, we no longer care about that. From that day forward, diseases come to mean one thing: a day off.
A day off!
Surely, this is a problem of evolutionary proportions. Surely, all of us working folk will be extinct by natural selection by anyone who views diseases with the proper life-death pro and con arguments (i.e., life = good, death = bad). These level-headed people will rightly not rejoice when they are sick, even if it means spending a day in bed after 2 months of 60-hour weeks.
A day in bed…Ooooooh yeah.
Clearly, I am not of part of that superior group. I will be one of the millions to become extinct. But people of my kind, despair not. It’s not our fault. We must blame society. Why? For it is society that has made a safe harbor out of getting a slight headache. You only get three weeks off a year (hasn’t it occurred to these people running our companies that days off to us are like oxygen in our blood?! And that giving us more of them would catapult productivity on the days we come to work straight to the moon? Has it? If it has, they’re certainly hiding it pretty well. Phhhh), but if you’re sick – well, in that case you’re basically allowed another two weeks of unaccounted for, uncorroborated, personal time.
As long as you don’t overdo it, you basically have complete jurisdiction over when and why to take a sick day. Try to take a vacation, they’ll want to confirm or deny the request based on business needs. Sickdays they’ll never question. “I hope you’re feeling ok today Tom,” they’d say. “No need to overwork yourself right after being sick Dick,” they’d add. “Can I make you some tea, Harry?” a particularly zealous few of them would offer.
So, it’s completely society’s fault. Society makes it beneficial for any rational individual to take a sick day. If you’re sick, people understand you and even fawn over you, and you can spend a day in bed. Conclusion: sick = good. Derived conclusion I: sick = death. Derived conclusion II: death = good. That last one will really do us in as a sub-specie.
Tuesday this week, I took a sick day. We get 9 of them a year. It’s like reaching for the cookie jar – you can’t do it too often, but when you do it… well, it’s a guilty pleasure. very guilty pleasure. This time, however, I was actually sick. No lying necessary. Honest. Boy scouts’ honor. Stick a needle in my eye. All that.
I woke up to find my body weak and aching. Clearly, it wasn’t going to carry me all the way to the bus stop. I’m not that much into pills. My strategy in dealing with illness is to sleep it out. I generally enjoy coziness more than the average guy. Also, there is medicinal value to sleeping, so say I. Your body is resting, and is gathering strength. Strength defeats illness, not pills.
Faithful to my strategy, I called in sick and slept in till 2 (yes! yes!). I slept so hard it hurt to be awake. When I wobbled out of bed there was a deep crease on my skin, all along on the right side of my torso. Apparently my right hand was aggressively clutching the side of my bed, and the pointy edge dug a laced pattern into my skin. Amusing. Not necessarily related, but amusing.
2 o’clock on a Tuesday. What to do? I haven’t encountered a situation in which I had to ask this question for the last 7 months. At work, the most common choice I make is whether to do work or procrastinate, but there’s never a complete loss as to what to do.
My choice of activities was constrained by my geriatric-like condition. My body was aching all over, I was coughing and probably burning up, and my head felt light. I ambled to the kitchen and then to the living room and then back again, mainly to test out what I could do in this state. I decided that I’d feel less of a bum if I went outside of the apartment. There’s a coffee shop in my neighborhood, one of the independent coffee shops San Francisco residents take indigenous pride in. Well, there are a lot of coffee shops in my neighborhood, but that’s the one I went to.
I was basically taken by complete shock when I came in. I must have looked like a nutter, standing there, mouth maybe agape, maybe not, bu no one really seemed to have noticed. Nutters are another common element of San Francisco life, incidentally.
The place isn’t weird or anything. It has gray floor tiles that look like they’re made of marble. Maybe they are, maybe it’s something cheaper. Armchairs are scattered in groups of four, and there are wooden chairs to fill up the leftover space. The tables are made of some kind of stone, probably, and some of them are connected to the floor. There were two barristas, both women with tattoos, one had heavy-framed glasses and the other lip piercing. The latter seemed like the shift manager. I came up to her and ordered a cafe mocha. Yuppie coffees are an emerging trend in my consumer spending behavior. Then I kind of fell into an armchair.
Who were all these people?
The place wasn’t packed, but it was pretty well filled up. I might as well have walked in on a Sunday afternoon. It seemed incomprehensible to me that these people had time to hang out on a Tuesday afternoon. Jobs? Anyone here has jobs?
The shift manager lady walked to my armchair and gave me the cafe mocha. They had some jagged blues playing, but I kept trying to be in a different mood. Maybe more like this. I was fascinated by all these people around. They were girls and boys, old and young, a few wearing unfortunate headgear, most everybody wearing cloth shoes. I had expected the place to be nearly empty.
To my right was sitting a rather cuddley fellow, black windbreaker and black windbreaking pants. He was old, white goatee, and had reading glasses. He was looking ostensibly nowhere in particular. But he noticed I was looking at him. If he thought he was fooling anybody, he was mistaken. There are a lot of people like in San Francisco: putting a lot of weight on ephemeral social interaction. We’re just sitting close to each other in a coffee shop, Mr. Cuddley Fellow, nothing special.
“Did you serve in the military?”
He suddenly asked. I said no, I did not serve in the U.S. military.
“I saw your ring, thought it was from the Air Force Academy.”
I explained it was my graduation ring from a liberal arts college from Massachusetts. Good catch on his part, nonetheless. I asked him about his ring. Mine was a thin silver one. His was far more thick and golden. It also had a blue rock.
“Graduated in the first class of the Air Force Academy, the proudest moment of my life,” said he. He indicated the year, and I thought I heard “1964.” After the conversation I checked it out. Maybe I heard it wrong – he must have said “1954.” I didn’t doubt him.
He had a baseball cap on, embroidered with the Air Force logo. Talked about his service in a radar station somewhere in Colorado, and how he transferred to Arizona at some point. “Really hot over there,” he laughed.
He changed the subject on his own to discuss the JCC and how he used to use the gym there until the building moved or something. He likes his current gym, too. “74 years old and I’m in good shape, but I can’t walk all the way over to the JCC now.” We talked a bit about California in the 70s, and how Reagan threw out all the mental patients living until then in government mental institution. “Threw them out on the street.”
It was a good talk. After a while, I got antsy. It happens to me a lot of I’m talking people considerably older than I. Why did I get antsy? In any case, I said goodbye and it was nice talking. He looked he was about to say something about the JCC before I bid farewell, but he immediately stopped himself and got with the program. It looked like he experienced abrupt goodbyes like that.
I got back home and lay on the couch. I had learned a few things about this John, a 1954 Air Force Academy graduate, formerly known as Mr. Cuddley Fellow. Probably useless things in any other context, but still, it was interesting. He told me he hadn’t missed a day visiting this coffee shop for last 8 years or something like that. I told myself maybe I’ll see him again. It definitely took me out of the sick day mentality. There are people out there who live outside of the working world, young professional, grindstone. It was fun to encounter one of them.
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