most people would consider two paid weeks off of work a real treat, but this is only my second day of being stranded at home with mono, and i'm already bored silly. i can't do anything but stay in bed and watch old episodes of "the office". about 11 o'clock this morning, i couldn't stand lying around anymore, so i got up and shaved my legs. immediately afterwards i had to lie back down because i felt light-headed and shakey. quite a removal from the daily six-hour long stand-up routine that is my job.
at any rate, being sick at home reminded me of the time i got sick in japan. everybody gets sick in japan at some point. our gaijin blood just can't handle those ninja bacteria, and we all spend too much time drinking and working and not enough time sleeping or eating. most foreigners have only themselves to blame when they come down with some strange asian malady, but i have someone else to blame. i blame dom.
samurai bar in kyoto, where we did lots of drinking and only a little sleeping.
it all started when one of dom's childhood mates came to visit. they decided to live on the wild side a bit, so they took off to thailand for a few days of drinking booze, getting cheap massages, and playing "penis or no penis?" with the locals.
when they returned, dom called me at work and in his most pitiful voice told me that they'd gotten food poisoning from some dodgey restaurant and had both been heaving since they got on the plane. they were back at his place, but they were both exhausted, dehydrated, and feeling very ill.
well, i'm a good friend, so when i finished my shift, i stopped at the 99 shop and picked up some crackers and soda for the little travellers. i hung out at dom's for a while, listened to all their tales of misadventure, and made sure they were comfortably tucked in for the night.
next morning at work, dom was out sick. strange, i thought, since food poisoning is usually pretty short-lived.
a few hours later, i was sitting in a lesson with a ten-year old girl going over all the things you can do at the fair. "i want to ride the merry-go-round. what do you want to do at the fair?" "i want to eat cotton candy." etc. suddenly, i started feeling sort of... not right. sort of clammy and sweaty and... yucky. i stood up and excused myself in my shit japanese, then i made a beeline for the teachers' lounge. a couple of my esteemed colleagues were on their lunch break. i made some kind of gesture towards the door and said something like "kid... lesson... room 10..." before i high-tailed it to the women's room where i spewed and started to topple over. thank god for mikey, who is gay and therefore unafraid of following friends into the women's room to make sure they don't topple over into their own spew.
as you already know, food poisoning is not contagious. however, the wicked thai flu those boys brought home certainly was. i was a train-wreck for three days, and i can't begin to adequately describe the awkward technical difficulties involved in spewing into a japanese toilet. they simply were not designed for it. and unlike the boys, who got to enjoy their vacation before they got sick, i didn't even get a massage to balance the karma.
dom did bring me a box of chocolates shaped like orchids though. that helped a little.
dom and his mate doing celebratory shots of tequila once their stomachs had settled (several days later!)
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