(no subject)
So, I guess that if I absolutely had to pass out from a high fever, doing it while already in the hospital for my physical therapy appointment was not a bad idea. I was feeling a little funky on Thursday morning before I got there, but it got worse as they had me walking more, and I should have known I was hallucinating when someone started talking about an earthquake in Greenwich. Next I knew, I was back in a hospital bed, and not just as deja vu. Real deal. Fever of 103. Apparently that's going around like, well, fire. They made me stay until Saturday morning. Hospitals are really a pain, but they're good to have.
And now I'm in my apartment. I haven't touched newspapers or email. I went to the grocery store, but that barely counts as reentering the world of the living. Though considering recent politics, it would probably be better for me to avoid news until all this crap has cleared from my sinuses and chest. Less stress, good for the heart rate, yadda yadda. If the statistics the nurse told me are true, then odds are the people who may have emailed me are also too sick to check for my response just yet.
14 January 2007:
There's really only so much orange juice one can carry, particularly when one is doing his shopping from one of those electronic wheelchair-basket things. And even more so when one's crutches are sticking out of the basket. But Andre still has enough orange juice in his motorized cart to give the impression that he exists solely on citrus, which is really not too far of a stretch for a Californian. He rolls slowly down the produce aisle, periodically stopping and dabbing at his nose with a tissue.
Kathryn wanders down the aisle, seeming almost aimless, but really she's just too tired to go about gathering groceries quickly. The basket slung over her arm has some basic food supplies, cough drops, Kleenex. The basics for someone getting over being sick. Last thing to pick up, some orange juice. She stops in front of the various cartons, looking confused. "Okay. So which one's just plain old orange juice..." She quips to no one in particular as she looks at 'calcium fortified', 'extra pulp', 'pulpless', 'homestyle'. "Argh, too many choices." She quips again out loud.
Andre hears Kathryn's statement and scooters his way over, guilt flickering in his tired dark-rimmed eyes as he gestures vaguely at the contents of his basket. "It's all in here. You can have one if you don't mind that I touched it and have cooties." He frowns at the multitude of other types of juice.
Kathryn startles just slightly at a voice to her side. Her face is pale, cheeks slightly sunken, light eyes still a bit glassy. "Eh, it's okay, I don't wanna steal your juice, though I'm sure you have no more cooties then I do." She gives him a lopsided grin. "Just wondering why there has to be 27 varieties of orange juice." She laughs as she grabs a carton of 'homestyle'. That sounds the most promising. Her eyes flicker to his basket with it's wide variety of juice. "Isn't winter fun?" She asks, referring to always being sick in afore mentioned season.
"I've got, like, six," Andre points out, powers of perception only so refined as to be able to count. Except there are actually only five cartons in there. "Ehh..." he considers, running the tip of his tongue along his chapped upper lip. "Probably because there are that many kinds of germs floating around and none of them respond to the same kind of juice." He nods weakly. "Oh winter. How I loathe you."
Kathryn nods, grinning a little at this. "Yes, finally someone who agrees with me!" She unceremoniously plops the juice on top of her basket, grabbing another one. "Most people are all 'I like the winter', 'I love the snow'. Blargh, not me. Bring on summer!" Her smile fades in her seriousness.
Andre is already not an entirely normal color, but he goes a little grayer at the mention of snow. "I'm from California," he offers in the same explanatory tone that professors use for basics on the first day of class...providing the professor had clogged sinuses. "I do not do snow."
"Okay, I'm pretty much New Yorker, but I still hate the snow. Cali? That's cool, I went to school out there. I liked how it never got cold." Kathryn nods as she speaks. "Don't care what the skiers think. Snow's evil."
Andre's face turns back to the slightly pinker peach-gray that it was before, and he manages a proper smile. "Which school did you go to there?" Genuine curiosity is audible past the post-nasal drip.
"CalState L.A. Was taking mechanics." Kathryn explains simply. "So where were you in California?" Kathryn asks in turn, curious herself.
Andre makes a sound that is vaguely like a first person singular pronoun, but it is cut off by a titanic sneeze. He does get a tissue in front of his nose and mouth before anything horrific can happen, but the force with which he expels air into the tissue causes his wheelchair-thing to roll back slightly. "Egh, excuse me." He shakes his head and looks back up at Kathryn. "I grew up in Berkeley. Went to UCLA, though!"
"Bless you!" Kathryn says as he sneezes, looking concerned. Once she was sure he was alright, she continued. "Oh yeah? Went up to Berkley once, kinda cool place." She nods. "What'd ya take?" She asks next.
"Thanks," Andre returns, wadding up the used Kleenex, dropping it in a jacket pocket, pulling a clean one out of a different pocket, and rubbing his nose. "Music major through and through. Took a couple of geology classes, yeah, but mostly lived in the percussion studio hitting stuff." This is cause for another smile.
Kathryn grins. "Hey, sounds good to me. Hitting stuff's always fun. Okay, me, other then listening to it I don't a musical bone in my body. For me, it's all about taking stuff apart and putting it back together." She causes her to laugh. "So do you play in a group or band or something then?"
"I'm in a good orchestra and a bad band," Andre explains. Pride, though tired, radiates through his tone at equal levels for both ensembles. "Though I kinda have to sit the next concert out." He reaches back slowly and taps his crutches, reassured that they have not escaped the back of the wheelchair cart. "What do you take apart and fix?"
Kathryn nods in understanding. "Ahh, I get you." She shifts her basket on her arm. "Car engines. Well, that's what I got a degree doing. I like to think I know a bit about computers too, but yeah, mostly car engines."
Andre inhales sharply, eyes half lidding, but this sneeze never comes. He merely sniffs, then notes, "Most people would call that way more important than a drummer is. I mean, I had to call a mechanic more than once in order to get to a gig on time. I still think I'd take freeways over winter, though."
"Hey, to each their own, ya know?" Kathryn grins as she pushes her hat back out of her eyes. "That's your thing, and that's cool."
Andre nods gently. Hair slips from behind his ears and falls across his face, and he reaches up to tuck the strands back where they belong. "If I didn't think it was cool, I would have found something else to do. You have to be crazy to be a musician, since it makes, like, zero money."
"That can be a downside." Kathryn admits seriously. "Unless you end up in some big, hot band or something like that." She adds after a moment.
"The orchestra here is pretty hot," Andre explains. His eyes are a little glassy from the cold, but there's a bit more gleam even than from that as he talks of his ensemble. "Well, when we're all there. Apparently a bunch of people in it have been laid low by this bug."
"Oh yeah, it seems to be really doing a number on people." Kathryn frowns. "I'm just getting over it myself, probably shouldn't even really be out yet, but woman cannot live on Pepsi and crackers alone." Kathryn allows herself a slight smirk. "I hope the others in your group feel better soon though."
Andre points solemnly at his cart full of orange juice. "There are certain vital things that do not show up at one's apartment by themselves. This is the first time I've been out, too. It's kind of weird. From the vacuum of my apartment to the vacuum of the store. I haven't even touched a newspaper in a few days."
"I've had the TV on for three straight days, but you know what, I can't tell you /anything/ that happened on it for the past three or so days." Kathryn shrugs. "Though I think at one point...there were aliens." She says in mock seriousness.
"Aliens?" Andre's mock wonderment is a little bit transparent. "Perhaps this is part of their scheme. Make everyone sick while...they...uh..." He stares at the floor a moment. "Make more kinds of orange juice and study our reactions!"
Kathryn laughs out loud. "Hey, I've seen worse plots in shows! Actually, it's kind of an interesting idea." She pretends to muse on this, then waves a hand. "I watch too much science fiction, that's what my problem is."
Andre's brow wrinkles in consideration. "Stuff like that could /actually/ get on TV?" This time, the wonderment is genuine. "Maybe that can make up for my being a broke musician. You know, I sell the plot to Hollywood..."
"The worst of it came out in like the '60s. I swear, they could get anything turned into a TV show or movie back then. /Anything/." Kathryn shakes her head. "I'm kind of a...closet fan of really bad sci-fi. So I've seen a lot of it." She explains.
"I'm a closet fan of really terrible disaster movies," Andre responds entirely too quickly, voice lowered. The volume, speed, and stuffiness make him a little hard to understand, but he does elaborate. "You know, really improbable stuff. Might as well be sci-fi. Cracks me up."
"Oh yeah, I know the kind of stuff you mean." Kathryn lowers her own voice as well, as though admitting dark secrets. "I like the 'men from Mars take over the world' kinda stuff. Or the living mummy/monster kind of stuff. They're just so terrible that they're great. If that makes sense."
"Or like giant land hurricanes simultaneously bury New York in snow and demolish LA with tornadoes." Andre's smile causes his sinuses to throb, but that in turn does not make the smile go away. "And then the wolves get out and bite all the survivors. Makes perfect sense!" He coughs. "I mean, the so terrible that it's great thing. Not the actual /plots/."
Kathryn grins. "And the wolf bites in turn turn everyone into zombies that can only be killed by having garlic thrown at them! Sure!" She snickers. "And the special effects too. It's so obvious the stuff's on strings or plaster on cardboard or something!"
"Like that volcano project everyone does in fifth grade with the baking soda and vinegar and food coloring!" Andre has none of these ingredients in his cart right now, but he gestures toward it anyway. "I'd bet that if I'd watched some of those while I was /really/ sick, they'd have reached a new level of hilarity."
"Oh yeah, it's worth a try. Either that, or it'd start to make sense and you'd end up running around the room screaming about it." Kathryn grins a little embarrassed-like. "At least that's what I'd probably end up doing." She admits.
"I kind of can't right now." Andre experimentally taps his left thigh. He winces, but it is less extreme of an expression than such a motion would have caused even the previous week. "Which is probably a good thing."
"True." Kathryn frowns again slightly, again shifting her basket. "Though you know what, on that embarrassing admission on my part, I should probably go pay for this stuff before my ice cream melts." She grins sheepishly again.
The grinning is catching up to Andre, and he rubs his cheekbones with the thumb and index finger of his left hand. "I don't want to keep you from creamy chocolate-laden healing processes," he acknowledges. "I hope you heal faster than I've been doing...and I won't tell!"
Kathryn grins and winks. "I appreciate that. And you too, man. Feel better, get back to banging on things again!"
Andre and Kathryn both make their first grocery store run after being sick. They clean out the orange juice section and talk about bad sci-fi and disaster movies. Also about winter, but that is less fun.
And now I'm in my apartment. I haven't touched newspapers or email. I went to the grocery store, but that barely counts as reentering the world of the living. Though considering recent politics, it would probably be better for me to avoid news until all this crap has cleared from my sinuses and chest. Less stress, good for the heart rate, yadda yadda. If the statistics the nurse told me are true, then odds are the people who may have emailed me are also too sick to check for my response just yet.
14 January 2007:
There's really only so much orange juice one can carry, particularly when one is doing his shopping from one of those electronic wheelchair-basket things. And even more so when one's crutches are sticking out of the basket. But Andre still has enough orange juice in his motorized cart to give the impression that he exists solely on citrus, which is really not too far of a stretch for a Californian. He rolls slowly down the produce aisle, periodically stopping and dabbing at his nose with a tissue.
Kathryn wanders down the aisle, seeming almost aimless, but really she's just too tired to go about gathering groceries quickly. The basket slung over her arm has some basic food supplies, cough drops, Kleenex. The basics for someone getting over being sick. Last thing to pick up, some orange juice. She stops in front of the various cartons, looking confused. "Okay. So which one's just plain old orange juice..." She quips to no one in particular as she looks at 'calcium fortified', 'extra pulp', 'pulpless', 'homestyle'. "Argh, too many choices." She quips again out loud.
Andre hears Kathryn's statement and scooters his way over, guilt flickering in his tired dark-rimmed eyes as he gestures vaguely at the contents of his basket. "It's all in here. You can have one if you don't mind that I touched it and have cooties." He frowns at the multitude of other types of juice.
Kathryn startles just slightly at a voice to her side. Her face is pale, cheeks slightly sunken, light eyes still a bit glassy. "Eh, it's okay, I don't wanna steal your juice, though I'm sure you have no more cooties then I do." She gives him a lopsided grin. "Just wondering why there has to be 27 varieties of orange juice." She laughs as she grabs a carton of 'homestyle'. That sounds the most promising. Her eyes flicker to his basket with it's wide variety of juice. "Isn't winter fun?" She asks, referring to always being sick in afore mentioned season.
"I've got, like, six," Andre points out, powers of perception only so refined as to be able to count. Except there are actually only five cartons in there. "Ehh..." he considers, running the tip of his tongue along his chapped upper lip. "Probably because there are that many kinds of germs floating around and none of them respond to the same kind of juice." He nods weakly. "Oh winter. How I loathe you."
Kathryn nods, grinning a little at this. "Yes, finally someone who agrees with me!" She unceremoniously plops the juice on top of her basket, grabbing another one. "Most people are all 'I like the winter', 'I love the snow'. Blargh, not me. Bring on summer!" Her smile fades in her seriousness.
Andre is already not an entirely normal color, but he goes a little grayer at the mention of snow. "I'm from California," he offers in the same explanatory tone that professors use for basics on the first day of class...providing the professor had clogged sinuses. "I do not do snow."
"Okay, I'm pretty much New Yorker, but I still hate the snow. Cali? That's cool, I went to school out there. I liked how it never got cold." Kathryn nods as she speaks. "Don't care what the skiers think. Snow's evil."
Andre's face turns back to the slightly pinker peach-gray that it was before, and he manages a proper smile. "Which school did you go to there?" Genuine curiosity is audible past the post-nasal drip.
"CalState L.A. Was taking mechanics." Kathryn explains simply. "So where were you in California?" Kathryn asks in turn, curious herself.
Andre makes a sound that is vaguely like a first person singular pronoun, but it is cut off by a titanic sneeze. He does get a tissue in front of his nose and mouth before anything horrific can happen, but the force with which he expels air into the tissue causes his wheelchair-thing to roll back slightly. "Egh, excuse me." He shakes his head and looks back up at Kathryn. "I grew up in Berkeley. Went to UCLA, though!"
"Bless you!" Kathryn says as he sneezes, looking concerned. Once she was sure he was alright, she continued. "Oh yeah? Went up to Berkley once, kinda cool place." She nods. "What'd ya take?" She asks next.
"Thanks," Andre returns, wadding up the used Kleenex, dropping it in a jacket pocket, pulling a clean one out of a different pocket, and rubbing his nose. "Music major through and through. Took a couple of geology classes, yeah, but mostly lived in the percussion studio hitting stuff." This is cause for another smile.
Kathryn grins. "Hey, sounds good to me. Hitting stuff's always fun. Okay, me, other then listening to it I don't a musical bone in my body. For me, it's all about taking stuff apart and putting it back together." She causes her to laugh. "So do you play in a group or band or something then?"
"I'm in a good orchestra and a bad band," Andre explains. Pride, though tired, radiates through his tone at equal levels for both ensembles. "Though I kinda have to sit the next concert out." He reaches back slowly and taps his crutches, reassured that they have not escaped the back of the wheelchair cart. "What do you take apart and fix?"
Kathryn nods in understanding. "Ahh, I get you." She shifts her basket on her arm. "Car engines. Well, that's what I got a degree doing. I like to think I know a bit about computers too, but yeah, mostly car engines."
Andre inhales sharply, eyes half lidding, but this sneeze never comes. He merely sniffs, then notes, "Most people would call that way more important than a drummer is. I mean, I had to call a mechanic more than once in order to get to a gig on time. I still think I'd take freeways over winter, though."
"Hey, to each their own, ya know?" Kathryn grins as she pushes her hat back out of her eyes. "That's your thing, and that's cool."
Andre nods gently. Hair slips from behind his ears and falls across his face, and he reaches up to tuck the strands back where they belong. "If I didn't think it was cool, I would have found something else to do. You have to be crazy to be a musician, since it makes, like, zero money."
"That can be a downside." Kathryn admits seriously. "Unless you end up in some big, hot band or something like that." She adds after a moment.
"The orchestra here is pretty hot," Andre explains. His eyes are a little glassy from the cold, but there's a bit more gleam even than from that as he talks of his ensemble. "Well, when we're all there. Apparently a bunch of people in it have been laid low by this bug."
"Oh yeah, it seems to be really doing a number on people." Kathryn frowns. "I'm just getting over it myself, probably shouldn't even really be out yet, but woman cannot live on Pepsi and crackers alone." Kathryn allows herself a slight smirk. "I hope the others in your group feel better soon though."
Andre points solemnly at his cart full of orange juice. "There are certain vital things that do not show up at one's apartment by themselves. This is the first time I've been out, too. It's kind of weird. From the vacuum of my apartment to the vacuum of the store. I haven't even touched a newspaper in a few days."
"I've had the TV on for three straight days, but you know what, I can't tell you /anything/ that happened on it for the past three or so days." Kathryn shrugs. "Though I think at one point...there were aliens." She says in mock seriousness.
"Aliens?" Andre's mock wonderment is a little bit transparent. "Perhaps this is part of their scheme. Make everyone sick while...they...uh..." He stares at the floor a moment. "Make more kinds of orange juice and study our reactions!"
Kathryn laughs out loud. "Hey, I've seen worse plots in shows! Actually, it's kind of an interesting idea." She pretends to muse on this, then waves a hand. "I watch too much science fiction, that's what my problem is."
Andre's brow wrinkles in consideration. "Stuff like that could /actually/ get on TV?" This time, the wonderment is genuine. "Maybe that can make up for my being a broke musician. You know, I sell the plot to Hollywood..."
"The worst of it came out in like the '60s. I swear, they could get anything turned into a TV show or movie back then. /Anything/." Kathryn shakes her head. "I'm kind of a...closet fan of really bad sci-fi. So I've seen a lot of it." She explains.
"I'm a closet fan of really terrible disaster movies," Andre responds entirely too quickly, voice lowered. The volume, speed, and stuffiness make him a little hard to understand, but he does elaborate. "You know, really improbable stuff. Might as well be sci-fi. Cracks me up."
"Oh yeah, I know the kind of stuff you mean." Kathryn lowers her own voice as well, as though admitting dark secrets. "I like the 'men from Mars take over the world' kinda stuff. Or the living mummy/monster kind of stuff. They're just so terrible that they're great. If that makes sense."
"Or like giant land hurricanes simultaneously bury New York in snow and demolish LA with tornadoes." Andre's smile causes his sinuses to throb, but that in turn does not make the smile go away. "And then the wolves get out and bite all the survivors. Makes perfect sense!" He coughs. "I mean, the so terrible that it's great thing. Not the actual /plots/."
Kathryn grins. "And the wolf bites in turn turn everyone into zombies that can only be killed by having garlic thrown at them! Sure!" She snickers. "And the special effects too. It's so obvious the stuff's on strings or plaster on cardboard or something!"
"Like that volcano project everyone does in fifth grade with the baking soda and vinegar and food coloring!" Andre has none of these ingredients in his cart right now, but he gestures toward it anyway. "I'd bet that if I'd watched some of those while I was /really/ sick, they'd have reached a new level of hilarity."
"Oh yeah, it's worth a try. Either that, or it'd start to make sense and you'd end up running around the room screaming about it." Kathryn grins a little embarrassed-like. "At least that's what I'd probably end up doing." She admits.
"I kind of can't right now." Andre experimentally taps his left thigh. He winces, but it is less extreme of an expression than such a motion would have caused even the previous week. "Which is probably a good thing."
"True." Kathryn frowns again slightly, again shifting her basket. "Though you know what, on that embarrassing admission on my part, I should probably go pay for this stuff before my ice cream melts." She grins sheepishly again.
The grinning is catching up to Andre, and he rubs his cheekbones with the thumb and index finger of his left hand. "I don't want to keep you from creamy chocolate-laden healing processes," he acknowledges. "I hope you heal faster than I've been doing...and I won't tell!"
Kathryn grins and winks. "I appreciate that. And you too, man. Feel better, get back to banging on things again!"
Andre and Kathryn both make their first grocery store run after being sick. They clean out the orange juice section and talk about bad sci-fi and disaster movies. Also about winter, but that is less fun.