Thursday, March 25, 2010

Thursday

I could feel the sickness coming on Sunday night. Sitting on the couch, watching the UFC, I tried to remove what I thought was a piece of popcorn skin lodged in the back of my throat with copious amounts of jaw breakers. As the night progressed, however, the scratching spread farther down my throat until I had to concede to the fact that I did indeed have...a cold. Sunday night I hardly slept. My mouth was so dry it hurt to breathe. Monday morning I woke up with less of a sore throat, and it continued to lessen throughout the day...moving instead to my sinuses and filling them with nothing other than oodles and oodles of mucus. Hurray! Tuesday saw me drinking abnormal amounts of fluid in an effort to drown my body's invaders. That night I slept like a spluttering old man on his back, snorting and gurgling in between absurd subconscious tries to take in oxygen through clogged nostrils. Wednesday was like Tuesday on repeat, though I slept a little more soundly (save for the dream involving a small girl afraid of an even smaller imaginary girl and a knife fight with an old man and his dark, math-studying son).
And so here we are, arrived at Thursday and still not a clear nostril in sight. I'd hoped to be back on the mat by now, but my sinuses won't have it.

In addition to my illness, I now have what is most easily explained as the equivalent of three weeks "off". Yesterday marked the delivery of my fourth write-up concerning cash handling. Doomed as I am in the math department, it figures just as much. My manager has graciously given me a fifth chance to rectify the problem. As a disciplinary measure, all my shifts have been hacked away, leaving me with one "register training shift" and one closing shift in the next two weeks before leaving for the Pan-Ams. In the meantime, I will be searching for a second job to "pass the time", if you will. At $8.75 an hour plus tips, I need more to keep myself alive.

So now I sit, sipping (or rather, gulping) my third consecutive cup of tea in the last half hour, waiting anxiously for my return to the mat and a lovely dinner with co-worker and manfriend later this evening.

1 comment: