|
|
|
John's cold sore diagnosis
Thursday, January 4 2001
I was pleased to find that whatever had plagued me yesterday was no longer much of a problem by the first light of dawn this morning. Evidently I'd sweated the contagion out of my body. Even the sweat, which had been thoroughly soaking my sheets during a brief bout of nocturnal sleeplessness, had completely evaporated.
So I got up and went to work, feeling unusually cheerful, the way someone does when he realizes he is not actually going to die after all. It was another beautiful sunny day, and like all such days during the mild Southern California winter, the morning was cold enough to bring tears to my eyes as I cycled to work.
Reading and responding to emails, that was my work this morning. That wouldn't be such a bad job; I could even get into it. The subtle crafts of the put-down-made-to-sound-like-praise and the 'we're-really-fucked'-made-to-sound-like-optimism are unexpectedly fulfilling in the way that database design just isn't anymore.
In the evening, John prepared a dinner of salad and beans for Fernando and me. Fernando was concerned about a cold sore in the corner of his mouth, his first ever. But if he thought talking to John was going to help, he was mistaken. "You know what that's from? That's from eating some nasty snatch! That's herpes, and it transfers from genitals to mouth really easily. It can be controlled but it can never be cured. You can bet we'll be using some soap on these dishes tonight!" John abandoned his dinner to do a web search, quickly finding a page confirming his diagnosis. "But I haven't had any ass in longer than I can remember!" Fernando protested. John looked to me for confirmation and I had nothing to add or subtract except, "maybe it's a vitamin deficiency."
Later, soon after we'd gone over in detail what had happened between John and Chun the night they took ecstasy, Chun arrived and we all decided to go down to our neighborhood coffee shop for Thursday night jazz. Chun even changed from her workout clothes into a sparkly skirt for the occasion.
It wasn't a bad turnout for a Thursday night, but there were only two musicians: the dreadlocked pianist (the one who moans loud throaty "oh yeahs" while he plays) and the brown-polyester-suit-wearing saxophone dude. After awhile John's sister Maria showed up and had a good cry on John's shoulder about how much she hates her dot com job, where she's been hired as a project manager but all she gets to do is secretarial work.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?010104 feedback
previous | next |
