It's Getting Cold
Thursday. I left work early and got home around 3:00 in time to crawl into bed and watch Public News. Then I dozed off, awakened by a telephone solicitation from Providian Financial about a credit card. Without thinking I said "Your company has a terrible reputation and I would never do business with you." and hung up. Well, I was sick. There are other more accurate and descriptive words I could have used.
They get a lot of these, I would think, but maybe they keep statistics and my reaction went in the "negative response" column. They've called before. I've read about Providian: Think six steps below pond scum. They were sued and had to pay multiple millions in penalties for their sleazy practices, but, fines or not, they're the same group with the same management. The wife of a friend worked in their marketing department. She said she began to feel unclean. It was 6:30 when I received the call, a two and a half hour nap. Good.
The denim pants arrived at the office from Land's End and they seem to fit. Maybe a little longer in the leg than I would like, but I haven't washed them yet. The denim shirt isn't exactly what I would call a denim shirt, 100% cotton, and large is larger than I realized. We'll see what it looks like after washing, see if it looks like a sheet of aluminum foil that you've crushed up into a ball and then spread out flat on the table. And if it still fits like a tent. Maybe I need a medium. Maybe I need more research. Maybe I need to just go to a real store and buy a bale of these things like regular (male) people.
I left work early because of the cold, of course. The symptoms seemed about the same, although my lungs are starting to hurt and right now I'm sitting here hunched over in a sweater and a jacket to keep from shivering, but along about 2:00 in the afternoon at the office I hit the wall. So I came home and crawled into bed with my blankie.
Friday OK, this one turned out to be the real thing. One of those get into bed and
roll up into a hermetically sealed cocoon without the slightest little opening to the artic air and wait for the chills to subside. Drink orange juice. I spent yesterday afternoon in bed, slept halfway through the night, woke up at 3:00 in the morning, took a bath, got up around 5:00 again, realizing I was in a window of some sort where I could probably make it across town without dying and drove over to Safeway, knowing this brief period of no chills and relative coherence wouldn't last. Large containers of orange juice, bottles of Coke, grapefruit, some things to actually eat: chicken, lamb chops and Cheerios. I like Cheerios special. This is a 24 hour store, the size of a military base with twenty check out counters and I was one of three customers shopping. Everything is safe in the refrigerator in the kitchen behind me to get me through the weekend.
Bath when I got up at 3:00 in the morning, another bath later this afternoon, all else huddled under the covers keeping back the chills. The eyes are all red and gooey. I woke up with my eyelids sealed shut. I'm trying to remember if I've had anything like this before. Probably. The thought passes maybe this is something to think about and maybe it would be nice to have someone else around, if only to call for the ambulance, or the morgue.
Well, it's now 4:30 or so in the afternoon. We will see how the evening goes, if the chills die down and the body feels better. I am sitting here in my new Land's End denims with an old bulky red sweater and an Eddy Bauer goose down vest. So far so good. One of those don't want to read, don't want to watch television, don't want to, well, here I am sitting at the computer. I feel like Sticky Fingers, biologically connected to this thing. Gotta go. It's getting cold.
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