So I’m suffering with some kind of throat infection right now, in which each gland is swollen on different days and today is hurting the absolute s*** out of my left ear. And of course this is probably one of the last nice weekends for a long time. But that is not what I want to post about. No, I want to share the fever-induced realization I came to on Friday at work, when I was struggling to power through the day. At one point, there were a lot of different conversations going on around my cubicle, none of them particularly loud but I just couldn’t handle the sound of all of them at once. This is something that wouldn’t bother me on a normal day, but throw in a fever, chills (with the building AC still cranking) and the inability to swallow without pain and I just wanted to be anywhere but there.
Anyway, this took me back to a time when I was in the first grade and at one point during the school day, I started to feel really, really crappy. Same symptoms as above but I think I was nursing a higher fever at that point because I could barely focus. I was miserable and finally went up to ask if I could go to the nurse. We had a substitute that day, one I really liked because I think she’d read us Dr. Seuss books when I was in kindergarten and she was a nice older woman – except in this instance, she wouldn’t let me go to the nurse. I can’t remember her reasoning: it was either she didn’t believe that I was sick or it was later in the day and she figured I could suck it up and tough it out or whatever. But I was genuinely sick and I needed to lie down. That’s all I knew. I guess I wasn’t much of a hellraiser back then, because I went back to my desk and sat down and continued to feel crappy in silence.
Finally, our release was drawing near, and there was still some time left before dismissal, but what does our substitute want us to do for fun? Start drilling us with math problems for fun. And not just any math problems: multiplication. Which we hadn’t learned yet. She kept grilling us about this stuff and my classmates were like “Huh?” and I remember thinking “I DON’T KNOW I JUST WANT TO GO HOME.” At some point, my friend Kimberly, who was in second grade, came down to our classroom like she always did before dismissal because she walked home with my friend Brian and me. The teacher starts grilling her about multiplication and of course she understands it because she’s in second grade and she’s learned it, so she kind of saved us there, but still. I had to sit through god knows how many more minutes at my desk, feeling awful, because of math – and not even math that was helping me learn. It was math for the sake of torture.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where my realization comes in: it’s probably half the reason I was terrible at the subject from there on in. Because if I can’t handle minor things like people talking when I’m sick at 34, I can imagine I was probably scarred for effing life over that little “game” of multiplication when I was 6. So there.
Now I’m going to go suck on a lozenge and try not to be bitter about any of this.
