During the past week, two lessons I learned some time ago have been reinforced. I share them with you for two reasons: it gives me something to write about, and I feel that my dedicated readers should have access to this valuable information. Mostly reason one though.
Lesson 1: A simple headache will make me pretty mostly useless. Combine that headache with a cold and a cough and I’m a 150 lb paperweight.
I wander around most days feeling somewhere between normal (which means I don’t really think about myself) and feeling ten feet tall and bullet proof. Actually, I rarely feel bullet proof. But it captures the idea of feeling strong, which is really what I was getting at. “Strong” should probably be accompanied by a whole slew of conditionals such as “for my size,” “for an engineer,” and “for a man whose sole feats of strength involve opening stubborn bottles.” I left off those conditionals for the sake of my fragile male ego. The point here is that I normally feel pretty healthy. A sane person would think that a person who normally feels healthy would only feel a little bad when they got a little sick. That’s why sane people will never run the world.
When I get sick, the loss of my feeling-pretty-healthy-ness is so shocking and dramatic to me that I feel like death is sitting nearby sharpening his scythe. I start practicing things that I’d say at my eulogy, which proves that minor colds make me delusional because the dead rarely speak at their own funerals. Even though my body is physically capable of doing things like vacuuming, sweeping the floor, or shaving, I don’t do any of those for fear that the massive exertion required would tax my already feeble reserves of strength. Plus, stubble combined with my patented grimace of pain lets people know that I’m suffering and that they should feel appropriate amounts of sympathy for me. Strangely, they never do.
End lesson 1.
Lesson 2: Old people have no shame.
There’s some sort of unwritten law out there that says the closer one gets to retirement, the more one must talk about all the changes in bodily functions that happen with increased age.
I work with a fair quantity of old people. I think the average age in the company I work for is north of forty with a heavy lean toward fifty. Working here I’ve heard about colonoscopies, prostate exams, gall stones, kidney stones, heart bypasses, ED (why, oh why, did I have to hear about that one?), Viagra’s greatness, hernias (thankfully unrelated to the last two problems), constipation, high blood pressure, and diarrhea. And that’s just what I can think of off the top of my head. And I haven’t heard about any of these things from anyone under thirty. You could argue that most of the problems are related to aging, but young people get constipated and have diarrhea as well. We just don’t talk about it. And we certainly don’t talk about it in detail.
In short, working with old people has broadened my understanding of the human body’s amazing ability to be disgusting.
End lesson 2.
Lesson 1: A simple headache will make me pretty mostly useless. Combine that headache with a cold and a cough and I’m a 150 lb paperweight.
I wander around most days feeling somewhere between normal (which means I don’t really think about myself) and feeling ten feet tall and bullet proof. Actually, I rarely feel bullet proof. But it captures the idea of feeling strong, which is really what I was getting at. “Strong” should probably be accompanied by a whole slew of conditionals such as “for my size,” “for an engineer,” and “for a man whose sole feats of strength involve opening stubborn bottles.” I left off those conditionals for the sake of my fragile male ego. The point here is that I normally feel pretty healthy. A sane person would think that a person who normally feels healthy would only feel a little bad when they got a little sick. That’s why sane people will never run the world.
When I get sick, the loss of my feeling-pretty-healthy-ness is so shocking and dramatic to me that I feel like death is sitting nearby sharpening his scythe. I start practicing things that I’d say at my eulogy, which proves that minor colds make me delusional because the dead rarely speak at their own funerals. Even though my body is physically capable of doing things like vacuuming, sweeping the floor, or shaving, I don’t do any of those for fear that the massive exertion required would tax my already feeble reserves of strength. Plus, stubble combined with my patented grimace of pain lets people know that I’m suffering and that they should feel appropriate amounts of sympathy for me. Strangely, they never do.
End lesson 1.
Lesson 2: Old people have no shame.
There’s some sort of unwritten law out there that says the closer one gets to retirement, the more one must talk about all the changes in bodily functions that happen with increased age.
I work with a fair quantity of old people. I think the average age in the company I work for is north of forty with a heavy lean toward fifty. Working here I’ve heard about colonoscopies, prostate exams, gall stones, kidney stones, heart bypasses, ED (why, oh why, did I have to hear about that one?), Viagra’s greatness, hernias (thankfully unrelated to the last two problems), constipation, high blood pressure, and diarrhea. And that’s just what I can think of off the top of my head. And I haven’t heard about any of these things from anyone under thirty. You could argue that most of the problems are related to aging, but young people get constipated and have diarrhea as well. We just don’t talk about it. And we certainly don’t talk about it in detail.
In short, working with old people has broadened my understanding of the human body’s amazing ability to be disgusting.
End lesson 2.
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