Because it really is personal…

Yesterday around 4, after having a fine day of feeling grand and getting the Much Needed HDTV installed (which, I might add, really is a terrific picture, but I remain ambivalent about it’s necessity), I started feeling a little puny.

You know, not HORRIBLE, not Take-To-My-Bed Wretched, just…puny. Sensitive, whiny, picked on puny. I even cried…boy was that embarrassing, but there it was, me and my face in a white napkin while several other members of the household looked bewildered. Before supper (a tough but tasty rare roast beef, with yorkshire puddings and delicious gravy because I am the Gravy QUEEN) I called Sweet Daddio and begged him to stop at the Walmart and get me some remedies. “Whatever works” I said. “Get me some Zicam, and Dayquil, and Nyquil, and look around for anything else.”

You see, I am to go to Auburn Monday, and I CANNOT be sick. CAN. NOT. BE. SICK. Dad’s having surgery, Mom needs her hand held and someone to do the night driving, and being sick simply isn’t an option.

So, SD brought hom a sackful of stuff. Zicam being the most important, since the symptoms had just begun perhaps with it I can nip this thing in the bud. I’d forgotten how it leaves such a taste in your mouth that simply will not go away. I should have taken the first one after supper, rather than before. Oh well, zinc flavored roast beef. They tell me it was good. Every 3 hours I took one, as directed.

I anticipated feeling like I’d been run over by a truck this morning, that’s usually what happens. And yet, I don’t. I don’t feel FABULOUS, but I don’t feel horrible either. This is a good sign. I’ll keep taking the Zicam, and I have a gallon of grapefuit juice to work on as well. I’ll shower often, wash my hands, and make a pot of Jewish Penicillin (Thanks Superbee, I think of you every time I make it). I’ll chain shut #2’s bedroom door, and push ziploc baggies of soup to him through the crack at the bottom. Yes, he’s sick too.

You know what made me cry yesterday? Something that ordinarilly would have just made me mad, and in fact I was mad, but also upset, and feeling puny, like crying. The boys (#’s 2 and 3) kept going on a “balling”. Well, they meant playing basketball, apparently that is the vernacular for the sport. So, I explained to them how “balling” when I was growing up, was a euphemism for having gratuitous sex, and that I was really offended by that term, and wished they wouldn’t use it around me. Which they took as license to run into the ground, which made me mad, which made them laugh at me and do it even more. This upset me me, this complete lack of respect for my wishes on something that is admittedly minor, but it was the principle of the thing. I told them that, out of respect for their sensibilities, I didn’t walk around talking about “gosh my period’s heavy this month! I think I went through 3 tampons in an hour, wanna see them?” and I wished for the same consideration. I wasn’t telling them they could never talk like that, I was simply asking them not to do it around me. And they just didn’t get it. Especially #2. #3 either realized he’d actually upset me, and apologized, or realized something vague had happened that he needed to apologize for, even if he didn’t get *why*, he did realize that an apology was in order. #2, in his 18 yr old arrogance, is incapable of admitting wrongdoing, or perhaps of admitting that something he thinks is funny might be offensive to someone else. It’s as if he believes any opinion different from his is *WRONGDAMMIT* and the flaw is in my character for thinking differently from him. He’s always been like that, even as a 2 yr old. I guess i’d hoped he would outgrow it.

I’m still upset about this. Not necessarily the “balling” part, that’s just teenagers, but the complete lack of respect . This has upset me more than I realized, I guess because it reenforces the idea that I really am just a part of the scenery, something to be taken for granted. I don’t like that.

I don’t like it at all.