Drugs On Drugs
So I caught cold Wednesday night. I was hanging around the Dauten area, and I had every intention of leaving by 11. By the time I left (12:30), I became aware of a slight "myeh" in my upper respiratory tract. I said to myself as I walked back to my room, "I'm going to wake up sick, aren't I?"
My body's answer : You don't know the half of it.
I woke up at 9 for my 10-to-1 internship in the jungle wing of the Psych building. Observations : monstrously dehydrated, slightly dizzy, headache, left nostril completely stuffed. Conclusion : call in sick for the first time since I started working there, in September.
I looked up the number, dialed the one below it by mistake, then corrected my mistake but nobody picked up. As it should happen, the grad students who work above me in the Learning and Behavior Lab have no need to arrive much earlier than 10 if they've got an intern (such as myself) coming in that day. And they, having many better things to do (Crawford and her ape-man of a fiancee, Jonah Hirt, are busy planning their escape from Wash U and their move to Wisconsin. Claire is still busy taking classes, and otherwise drooling over the window office she'll procure when Crawford leaves. So why come in before 10?), seemed to be conducting their busy lives elsewhere, somewhere not within earshot of the laboratory phone. Where's Igor when you need him?
So I took a shower to kill the time, and damn it if I didn't feel good enough to go to work. If I had known a shower would give me enough strength to face my day, I might have just laid in bed dialing and re-dialing the lab number until somebody picked up. My honest worker's spirit unfettered by my illness, I packed my bookbag and started getting dressed.
And Carl called? I include the question mark because there are certain hours of the day in which my communication with Carl occurs, and 10am EST/9am CST is not within that range. Apparently, he wants to start a CAKE cover-band called FAKE; I've been wanting to pick up trumpet again, and here's my excuse. I told him everything that I just told you, about falling asleep and waking up sick and the shower miraculously curing me. So up until this point in the post, Carl's probably been bored. Sorry, Carl.
So the way Thursday went, I had to stay on Hilltop/Danforth Campus until about 5:30. It reassures me to know that I'm capable of doing a 9-to-5 day, even though it makes me incorrigably grumpy. I had a philosophy paper due on Friday, but in my infinite wisdom, I managed to get it done before I got sick. So, being without formal responsibilities that I could recall, I rolled a joint, stepped outside, and prepared myself for a new episode of The OC. You may say, at this point, isn't smoking while you've got an upper-respiratory illness a bad idea? And I wouldn't say anything. And here's why:
Most of the time, I have great faith in my immune system. I rarely get sick, and this is actually the first time I've had a bacterial/viral infection since last May (I specify bacterial/viral because I got food poisoning over Winter Break, but that's not my immune system's fault). But by the time The OC was over, I felt pretty sure that I was going to need pharmacological intervention to quickly and easily stomp out this cold.
To the CVS, and into the back where they keep the stuff you can cook Meth out of. I perused the shelf; Sudafed, NyQuil, DayQuil, Benadryl.... I picked up a box of NyQuil gel-capsules and nearly reached for a pack of DayQuil, but my Father's Father appeared on my shoulder and talked me out of it ("Whatta ya gotta buy this for? It's exactly the same, only this one makes you sleepy and this one makes you not sleepy. Just take the NyQuil with some coffee, and you've got DayQuil").
Apparently NyQuil has changed their formula, such that it no longer includes Pseudoephedrine (or, for you etymologists out there, FAKE SPEED). Old NyQuil, for the reason that it contained both fake speed and something to knock you on your ass, understandably worked for some people and didn't work for other people. I used to be one of those people who got jacked up on NyQuil (it brings to mind my first drug experience, sometime in High School, when I took a benadryl with pseudoephedrine and drank a Co-Cola and started tripping out in Jazz Ensemble. I think that was sophomore year. Me : "Hey, Gray. I took some sudafed and had a coke, and I'm just looking at my hands, and shit." Gray : "That's great, man."), but this new formula turns me into a puppet with half his strings cut; my arms fall, my head sags, I drag my feet yet stay upright. It was entertaining, all in all, but maybe I shouldn't have been stoned at the time.
So yeah, Drugs on Drugs. That's the story, there.
Last night was a party in Dauten 23. There was a makeshift stripper pole on the side of the room, and the music-responsive lights as usual. And lots of alcohol, and more people than showed up to the first two iterations of this party. At one point, there was a line to get in stretching out the door, across the hall and into the stairwell. The RA shut the party down shortly before 1am, but I was gone to Maggie's by then.
Today, I finally got around to setting up a podcast of my radio show. Here's the link for it, if you use iTunes. If you don't use iTunes and you really want to hear my show, then maybe you should think about your choice of media players.
Only Show #5 is up there now, but I'll get Show #6 and #7 up soon enough. Shows before #5 weren't recorded, so only my diligent, early-rising listeners will ever know what I played.
Long post. You deserve a spliff today, at McDoobies.
-Alan
My body's answer : You don't know the half of it.
I woke up at 9 for my 10-to-1 internship in the jungle wing of the Psych building. Observations : monstrously dehydrated, slightly dizzy, headache, left nostril completely stuffed. Conclusion : call in sick for the first time since I started working there, in September.
I looked up the number, dialed the one below it by mistake, then corrected my mistake but nobody picked up. As it should happen, the grad students who work above me in the Learning and Behavior Lab have no need to arrive much earlier than 10 if they've got an intern (such as myself) coming in that day. And they, having many better things to do (Crawford and her ape-man of a fiancee, Jonah Hirt, are busy planning their escape from Wash U and their move to Wisconsin. Claire is still busy taking classes, and otherwise drooling over the window office she'll procure when Crawford leaves. So why come in before 10?), seemed to be conducting their busy lives elsewhere, somewhere not within earshot of the laboratory phone. Where's Igor when you need him?
So I took a shower to kill the time, and damn it if I didn't feel good enough to go to work. If I had known a shower would give me enough strength to face my day, I might have just laid in bed dialing and re-dialing the lab number until somebody picked up. My honest worker's spirit unfettered by my illness, I packed my bookbag and started getting dressed.
And Carl called? I include the question mark because there are certain hours of the day in which my communication with Carl occurs, and 10am EST/9am CST is not within that range. Apparently, he wants to start a CAKE cover-band called FAKE; I've been wanting to pick up trumpet again, and here's my excuse. I told him everything that I just told you, about falling asleep and waking up sick and the shower miraculously curing me. So up until this point in the post, Carl's probably been bored. Sorry, Carl.
So the way Thursday went, I had to stay on Hilltop/Danforth Campus until about 5:30. It reassures me to know that I'm capable of doing a 9-to-5 day, even though it makes me incorrigably grumpy. I had a philosophy paper due on Friday, but in my infinite wisdom, I managed to get it done before I got sick. So, being without formal responsibilities that I could recall, I rolled a joint, stepped outside, and prepared myself for a new episode of The OC. You may say, at this point, isn't smoking while you've got an upper-respiratory illness a bad idea? And I wouldn't say anything. And here's why:
Most of the time, I have great faith in my immune system. I rarely get sick, and this is actually the first time I've had a bacterial/viral infection since last May (I specify bacterial/viral because I got food poisoning over Winter Break, but that's not my immune system's fault). But by the time The OC was over, I felt pretty sure that I was going to need pharmacological intervention to quickly and easily stomp out this cold.
To the CVS, and into the back where they keep the stuff you can cook Meth out of. I perused the shelf; Sudafed, NyQuil, DayQuil, Benadryl.... I picked up a box of NyQuil gel-capsules and nearly reached for a pack of DayQuil, but my Father's Father appeared on my shoulder and talked me out of it ("Whatta ya gotta buy this for? It's exactly the same, only this one makes you sleepy and this one makes you not sleepy. Just take the NyQuil with some coffee, and you've got DayQuil").
Apparently NyQuil has changed their formula, such that it no longer includes Pseudoephedrine (or, for you etymologists out there, FAKE SPEED). Old NyQuil, for the reason that it contained both fake speed and something to knock you on your ass, understandably worked for some people and didn't work for other people. I used to be one of those people who got jacked up on NyQuil (it brings to mind my first drug experience, sometime in High School, when I took a benadryl with pseudoephedrine and drank a Co-Cola and started tripping out in Jazz Ensemble. I think that was sophomore year. Me : "Hey, Gray. I took some sudafed and had a coke, and I'm just looking at my hands, and shit." Gray : "That's great, man."), but this new formula turns me into a puppet with half his strings cut; my arms fall, my head sags, I drag my feet yet stay upright. It was entertaining, all in all, but maybe I shouldn't have been stoned at the time.
So yeah, Drugs on Drugs. That's the story, there.
Last night was a party in Dauten 23. There was a makeshift stripper pole on the side of the room, and the music-responsive lights as usual. And lots of alcohol, and more people than showed up to the first two iterations of this party. At one point, there was a line to get in stretching out the door, across the hall and into the stairwell. The RA shut the party down shortly before 1am, but I was gone to Maggie's by then.
Today, I finally got around to setting up a podcast of my radio show. Here's the link for it, if you use iTunes. If you don't use iTunes and you really want to hear my show, then maybe you should think about your choice of media players.
Only Show #5 is up there now, but I'll get Show #6 and #7 up soon enough. Shows before #5 weren't recorded, so only my diligent, early-rising listeners will ever know what I played.
Long post. You deserve a spliff today, at McDoobies.
-Alan
posted by Alan Orlanski at 6:13 PM
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