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fever delirium dreams
Wednesday, March 14 2007
Reading about problems with developing code is probably the worse thing to do before having a night of fever delirium dreams. Ah, fever delirium dreams! Whenever I get a fever, my dreams take on an entirely different quality. They lose all depth and become a churning surface of geometry and math, repeating itself monotonously while somehow continuously disturbing the careful balance of its internal logic. The idea of computer code can easily be incorporated into such a mathematical nightmare, and so last night I saw algorithms not quite living up to their potential as they repeatedly spit out inconsistent results, the text of their commands shimmering as if written on the sides of jiggling slinkies. I had a whole night of that, punctuated with me waking with achy joints, bones, and head. Sometimes I'd cough, but nothing much was coming up. I was developing a sore throat.
Gretchen was at work and I was in bed, and I was feeling angry at her for having forced me to conceal my symptoms. Now, though, there was not going to be any getting around it: I was bedridden. I did somehow manage to walk the dogs this morning on a short loop through the forest, but after that I was uselessly horizontal. I couldn't even muster the motivation to read.
One enters a different mental space when one is sick. Suddenly, the wasting of time doesn't feel like a petty crime. One can spend hours doing nothing much more than staring blankly at the ceiling (or, in my case, the immobile ceiling fan with its cluster of four dimmable compact fluorescent globes beneath it). It's not even that there were any real thoughts in my head. A long time would seem to pass, but then I'd turn to look at the clock and it would only be a minute later than the last time I'd checked. Still, some amount of personal introspection can't help but happen in a situation like this. Here you are, after all, useless. God, remember the days when you could actually do things? What will you do when you can do things again? Won't that be a wonderful day?
When Gretchen finally came home, I was happy to find that she was no longer blaming me for my own illness. After all, by now I had objective proof of a medical issue, a fever of 101 F.
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