While not quite on a par with Wally’s bypass surgery, I’ve been home sick for the last four days. Mrs. Pluto thinks it is highly unlikely that I actually have cholera, but what does she know? Has she ever had cholera? So what makes her so sure I don’t? (Mrs. Pluto is one of those amusing women who think that men exaggerate their symptoms and suffer loudly what women would suffer in silence.)
Having learned from my suffering (silently!) I would like to pass on these gems of wisdom, painfully gleaned from the harsh field of reality as I hovered between life and death:
There is nothing worth watching on TV.
More channels doesn’t help.
It’s even worse on the weekend.
Our two dogs, who are supposed to be sympathetic (and not make snide remarks about sympathy and the dictionary, unlike a certain unspecified human resident of Plutoville) are merely pathetic, needing to be fed and watered and let in and out continuously, requiring their prostrate owner to painfully get in and out of bed ad nauseam. (And I do not use that phrase lightly!)
Along those same lines, does anyone among the Teeming Millions know the German words for left and right? We go out the front door to get the mail. We always go to the right–toward the mailbox. The dogs always go to the left. I tell them to go right. I tell them to heave to starboard. They just don’t get it. I’m guessing my mistake is in expecting them to understand English when they are dachshunds. If anyone can help me out here I’ll try it in German. I’m not optimistic.
So what’s with NASCAR? They had a race with 43 cars on a half-mile track! There was a big pileup on the very first lap! Only 23 cars were still running at the end of the race–one fourth of the laps were run under caution. You’d think they wanted them to crash! Oh. Never mind.
Actually, today and yesterday haven’t been too bad. I recovered my ability to concentrate sufficiently to finish the excellent book I’d been reading, The Elegant Universe, by Brian Greene. It’s the best layman’s explanation of string theory I’ve ever come across. (Translation: the only one I’ve ever even remotely understood.) My new Joni Mitchell CD, Both Sides Now, arrived and it is excellent! (Unfortunately, Mrs. Pluto likes it even more than I do so she has appropriated it. I’m just going to have to start buying two of everything. Or do something about Mrs. Pluto. Hmmm…I wonder how silently she’d suffer if she suddenly came down with cholera?) Plus I got a much needed break from work. More precisely, I got a much needed break from the people at work. So I suppose every cloud does have a silver lining.
I’ve got to go now. I have to call the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and report the cholera outbreak.
“I used to think the brain was the most important organ in the body, until I realized who was telling me that.”
Emo Phillips
Pluto,
Let Mrs Pluto know that whenever my husband had “cholera”, he has me make him homemade chicken noodle soup, toasted cheese sandwiches, and herbal tea. He then whines and cries until I hold him, stroke his head and coo “poor baby…poor, poor baby” over and over. A more pathetic sight I’ve never seen.
Hope you feel better soon!
Zette
“If I had to live your life, I’d be begging to have someone pop out both my eyes. Just in case I came across a mirror.” - android209 (in the Pit) Zettecity
Voted “Most Empathetic”- can you believe that?
Sorry to hear of your illness. Hope you get better. Tell Mrs. Pluto the Straight Dopers say to treat you better (unless you think she’ll swat you. )
What did you think of The Elegent Universe? Did Figures 11.2 - 11.6 make any sense to you? I’m wondering if they aren’t meant to be taken literally (or should that be “not meant to be taken figuratively”?)
I hope you feel better soon, pluto, but, with cholera being such a tricky affliction, you can actually stay sicker LONGER, if you keep getting up and down for your dogs.
Just a word to the wise…
“Um, according to who? Nothing more than a high brow troll, though occasionally the bi polar personality swung in a constructive direction on innocuous topics.” Omniscient
Women just don’t understand that a man’s masculine, hairy-chested, hormonally-enhanced body can fight off the little, cute, feminine bugs that women catch. When men get sick, it’s from the big, burly, evil super pathogens. That’s why it affects us harder–cuz we’re sicker!
hmmmpph. Cholera. Yeah, sure. I’d have considered offering some support, but I married a nurse. I had food poisoning over the weekend and I didn’t even bother mentioning it to her. Sympathy is for paying patients and she feels better if she makes the diagnosis herself. (“You sure kept getting up to go to the cyberian last night: are you sick? Must be food poisoning. Does this mean I have to help get the kids ready for Sunday school?”)
I thought it was a very good book. My only complaint was that he got a little long-winded sometimes explaining mathematical concepts without using any math. (In his preface to The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg said his editor told him that each equation in the text cuts the readership in half.) As to the figures in question I can’t say I found them terribly enlightening, but for the record I don’t think they were meant as an, um, literal depiction. None of the illustrations of the Calabi-Yau spaces were very helpful to my understanding–the text was much more informative, IMHO. I was glad to learn about them, but gladder still that I didn’t have to really learn about them.
Incidentally, citing the Straight Dope in an attempt to influence Mrs. Pluto is a lot like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.
I will admit that the diagnosis of cholera was slightly hyperbolic. Careful perusal of the available medical literature (amid jeering, catcalls and cries of “Look up hypochondria!”) indicates that the actual condition is (was) gastroenteritis, which is one step short of dysentery (but never more than two steps away from the toilet, if you get my drift).
Finally, Zette, I recall there was a lot of oohing and aahing on this board when you described the loving care with which you nursed Mr. Zette back to health. I conclude from my personal experience and from the comments of the other men in this thread that you are either 1) an exceptionally compassionate person, or 2) a person who missed the day in Home Ec class where they taught you to neglect and ignore sick males. In any case you are about to be set upon by angry wives everywhere who don’t want you upsetting the applecart.
Zette, I’m with you. Nothing like good nursing care when your good man is sick - complete with concerned and copious amounts of soup, drinks, backrubs, sympathy, and general mother-teresa-level care (find that remote, get a new box of tissues, do you need an extra blanket, maybe a popsicle would taste good to you?). Too sad for those who don’t get or give it!
But I don’t want to pay the penalty.
I just want to go home.
OK, just picture this in your fevered brain—all the SD gals (and some of the gay SD guys) hovering over you sympathetically, waving palm fronds at you, peeling grapes for your delectation, hoochie-cooching for your amusement, and locking Mrs. Pluto out of the room.
Away, you hussies and varletesses! Away, you nancy boys!
Arnold locks the door behind the departing party-goes, pulls out a chair and the family bible, and starts reading from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, which is sure to help with pluto’s recovery.
)