Once again things don't go exactly as planned

Last night I decided to make some dinner for J and me, because I was just getting to that stage of being sick where I still wasn't feeling that hot but was also getting bored. I decided to make soup, specifically Pasta Fagioli, which is this traditional Italian soup with pasta and beans and is one of the four or so things I can make pretty well without messing it up or stressing out. Plus, soup. I figured that would be good for me in my state. A cure in the form of food, I thought. This soup, it takes a long time. You sort of add things little by little, letting it simmer for a while. The recipe I use comes out of a cookbook compiled by Italian-American women, and always yields a ton, a whole, huge pot and we can eat leftovers for several days.

It was almost done, and of course it was after 9 pm, as J and I can't ever seem to get it together to eat dinner earlier than that, and I tasted the soup and decided it needed more salt, so I picked up this cylindrical container of sea salt we got at a gourmet store one time. I think we'd meant to give it to someone for Christmas or something because we don't normally go around buying gourmet salt for ourselves, but we've been using it, and the thing is the grains of this particular type of salt are kind of big, and tend to stick together, so you really have to shake the container to get anything out, and I don't know if it was maybe because I was sick and a little more easily frustrated than usual, but I couldn't get any salt out and began shaking really hard and before I knew it the plastic top had dislodged from the container and all the salt, all of it, had fallen into the pot.

At this point I started screaming "Oh no!" and J ran into the kitchen to see if maybe I'd hurt myself or fainted and I had to tell him that I'd shaken the salt container too hard and poured all the remaining salt into the pot and, of course, he started laughing, because I mean, I guess it was funny. It was, it was funny. I don't know if it was more or less funny than what we did next - J decided we could maybe resolve the issue with science, by draining all the broth and rinsing all the pasta and soaking it a little to remove the salt, and then trying to save it with tomato sauce. So we did all this and settled onto the couch and had each taken a few bites before we sort of put our bowls down and admitted, "It's still pretty salty, isn't it?"

So just so you know, just in case you ever accidentally stir your entire three-quarters full container of sea salt into your dinner, don't bother trying to save it, because we've tried and it doesn't exactly work. And since it was already so late and we were tired, we just sort of broke off a few pieces of some really good bread I'd bought to go with the soup, ate that, and then polished it off with some jelly beans left over from Easter. I've accepted at this point that we're never going to be culinary experts, exactly. But we know every restaurant in town.

Down for the count

When I got home from my trip Monday afternoon I very quickly succumbed to some sort of sickness I must have picked up on one of the many planes or trains or subways I've been on in the past few weeks - the kind of sickness I feel I'd never otherwise get except for the travel, spending a lot of time in small spaces with the multitudes, observing humanity, including sharing their germs, compounded by my body being not quite up to fighting strength due to a rather hectic schedule. This is the kind of sickness I feel people only get in sitcoms, a kind of vague mishmash of symptoms, including fever, sore throat, coughing, headache, chills, nausea and aches - the kind of thing you see some actor playing out on screen and say, "It's never really like that when you get sick." Except for having the flu, which I've been lucky enough to avoid since childhood, my sick spells are usually more pointed, more specific. A head cold. Food poisoning. A sinus infection. Not everything all at once.

Because I realize that this is a clear signal my body is sending me to just sit still for a few days (and because I can't really do otherwise without falling over) I've done a completely decent job of staying home sick the past couple of days. Watching movies in bed, sleeping a lot, drinking lots of fluids, barely moving. Trying to let myself heal. Trying to stay upbeat, which is rather difficult.

Around 4 am this morning, for instance, I woke up with a piercing pain in my right ear, the demons clogging my system having decided to take up residence there for a while, I suppose, resulting in an earache that lasted for several hours. An earache, for Christ's sake! I never even suffered earaches as a youngster, as so many children do, but I now understand why they cry like that, those poor kids - the pain - and the next time I see a child plagued by ear infections I'm going to go right out and by him or her a pony.

Because I am sick, and therefore a total pain in the ass, I sort of passively woke up J - who has been an absolute angel - by kicking my legs about in bed and moaning quietly and proclaiming that my fever was back and not only that but I had an earache and also I was dying. He turned over and told me that everything was going to be alright, that I had to "fight this with a positive attitude," before he drifted back to sleep.

I lay there in bed a few moments, contemplating throwing another tantrum, this time with wildly flailing limbs and proclamations about how "this just isn't fair!" but I realized that, actually, it is fair. I've had an amazing time of it lately, seeing friends and and family and traveling, and if the payment is nothing more than sitting around the house watching movies and daytime television for a few days while being alternately very hot then very cold and sometimes not being able to hear out of my right ear, well, I can handle that. And I can even try, as J suggested, to handle it with a somewhat positive attitude, or at least stop the moaning. Ok, at least stop the moaning in the middle of the night. There's no need to stifle my complaints, to try and be all that positive in the middle of the day, really, when there's no one around to hear me.