Sick Day
It started with the telephone. I was going back to bed after getting the kids off to school. The head cold and the interrupted night’s sleep had rendered bed necessary. But if the phone rang, I did not want to have to get up, so I picked up the handset and carried it with me into the bedroom.
I also collected the portable DVD player. It had a half-watched movie in it and that would be a good follow-up activity to sleeping. Then I remembered that the first half of the movie had triggered some writing thoughts. If I was going to have writing thoughts, I needed my notebook. I retrieved that. Then I also retrieved a brand new notebook from downstairs because I’m almost out of pages in the first one. If I used the last page I didn’t want to have to get up for another notebook.
I carried these things to my room. Where I saw my laptop plugged in across the room from the bed. I might want to write straight to the laptop rather than just scribbling notes, but I didn’t want to have to get out of bed to retrieve it from the other side of the room. So I picked it up to carry it to the bedside table. Next to the laptop was the book I read yesterday. There were some quotations in the book that I wanted to blog about. In the same stack were my paper journal, and my scriptures, and the next book to read. I might as well carry them all to the bed.
At about this time I realized that some deep place in my brain had no intention of getting out of bed again. It planned to stay there all day and was nesting appropriately. The deep place of my brain was right. Other than getting kids from school and supervising some homework, I’ve been in bed. Often sleeping.
Howard laughed at my nesting, but he has taken good care of me. He fixed me both breakfast and lunch. He brought me extra blankets and he kept me company when I was awake.
The nesting was not futile. For some reason my half-asleep brain kept composing essays and blog entries. I kept trying to soothe it; petting it like a mother pets the head of a fretful child. I tried to convince my brain that we could let go of the thoughts, that they would be waiting for us on the other side of sleep. My brain was not convinced and could only be appeased by the copious scribbling of notes while laying down with one eye cracked open. Precious thoughts preserved, I was able to sleep. Viewed with a little more objectivity, some of those precious thoughts were…not so precious. But I find it encouraging that writer thoughts are so pervasive even when I am sick.
On a meta level it was amusing to watch myself this morning. I was aware that my thought processes were askew. My time sense certainly was. I am still a bit unfocused, but three hours of sleep made things somewhat better. More sleep is in my future. I also intend to summon pizza via the internet in order to supply dinner. Pizza sounds good. I still have that movie to watch. Today I am really glad that my kids are old enough to take care of themselves while I sleep.
(Yes this entire entry was written on the laptop while laying in bed.)