Tales from the Bedridden

So today has been an interesting day. Not that everyday isn't interesting, but I just feel like writing about today. I've had the flu now for the past three days. I've been doing a lot of sleeping and watching movies and youtube. There isn't much else to do when you have a fever of 103 and you can barely stand. Yesterday was grad-fair, and I had to go to that to get my cap and gown for graduation. Going out when you're very sick comes highly unrecommended. My only alternative was to make the 100mile drive to Bakersfield and buy one from the school bookstore there at a later date. With the price of gas as high as it is I opted to attend the grad-fair. I learned that driving with a high fever is probably not all that different than driving drunk. I also learned that when you stand in line for an hour on the verge of passing out only to find that they don't have any gowns for people over 6', you'll find out that you could have just ordered the dern thing online anyway. But I'm digressing, I'd only intended to talk about today. So today I had a term paper due for my Ethnic Literature class. The assignment was about as vague as the purpose statement for the class. I think when delving into controversial realms too deeply, you become immersed in a quagmire of PC lingo that makes it nearly impossible to communicate intelligibly. If a language is a set of sounds that have mutually agreed meaning, making the terms you use to define something as far from being a representation of what you're actually defining as possible, has the potential to cause quite a bit of confusion. And here I was worried that my paper would be unintelligible because I'm running a fever.

I also ruined a pair of shoes today, which is rather amazing considering I've barely stepped outside. My amazing urban pipelines, the preppiest shoes I own, which I got for $10.99 at Kolhs are pretty much kaput. I blame the outrageous price of rent in Southern California, or possibly the fact that I'm feverish (you can blame everything on that one). So due to the high price of rent in California I'm forced to live in a little run down pink hotel room. Yes, it's very gay. It's also only slightly larger than your standard walk-in closet. What little space I do have is taken up by books, my bed, my bike, and my clothes (living in a closet does have its perks). I have no room for furniture. This makes it difficult to eat meals. I resort to eating most of my meals while sitting on my bed. Needless to say I've become very ingenuitive. I discovered a long time ago that shoes make great cup holders. You can put a 20oz soda in a shoe, and it will sit there through a veritable earthquake. This discovery is something I've been very proud of for the past couple of years. Well, today when I got back from dropping off my paper, with a package subway lunch, I kicked off my flipflops, dropped my lunch on the bed, plugged in "Whitesquall" on DVD (great movie by the way) and set up my cup holder shoe and enjoyed my lunch and my movie. Two hours later, in the midst of the storm which the movie is named for, I noticed half an inch of liquid sloshing back and forth in the bottom of my shoe. There was a hole in the cup, dad gum it! I tried to wash the shoe out, but I don't have much hope that it can be salvaged. I can only imagine what it's going to be like walking around in sticky shoes. On the bright side, I learned that canvas shoes don't leak.