Ordeal Upon Ordeal

Trip to grad school town: fairly disastrous!

Plane out of Chicago was much delayed; didn't arrive in grad school town until after 1 AM. Fortunately the friends I was staying with were able to just leave their porch light on and door unlocked. I slipped in quietly and fell into bed.

Slept in some and then got to work preparing for the convention interview advice meeting and mock interview, all of which were starting at 3. I did do my best to prepare, but ...

Went to the meeting, having changed into my new suit. On the up side, the suit was praised as being absolutely appropriate. Hurray! On the down side, at least the dissertation spiel part of my mock interview was disastrous. I REALLY need to work on that. Our profs can be really scary when they try. I mean, they're scary even when they don't try, so ...

Although there were people I hadn't seen in a long time, and it was a real joy to see them, I also felt the mass accumulation of stress in the area to be far too much for me. I think we got each other more wound up rather than being able to give each other any real comfort.

So I opted for dinner with some other friends who are not on the market. We went to a restaurant I have always been rather fond of and considered reliable. My food didn't taste so great. I figured I'd just mis-ordered and ate it anyway. It was fun chatting with my friends, but I was increasingly distracted by strange feelings of discomfort and hot and cold. I thought it was just residual stress and tiredness, so we didn't linger much and went our separate ways (fortunately opposite directions).

Then I walked half a block and was very sick in a convenient garbage can. It was very surprising because I hadn't been sick like that since I was a kid. I have a strong stomach and even in China I got off pretty lightly, with only the occasional "spicy tummy" (diarrhea).

I walked around a little bit to calm down, but felt fine so I went back to the place I was staying. I didn't feel like eating anything at all, though those friends were having a late dinner of pizza. I hung out with them, drank some hot water. But pretty soon I was feeling pretty bad again. Anyone who's had food poisoning can guess at the gory details ... Fortunately they're good friends and I made it to the bathroom every time.

Originally I had planned to walk to small trunk station to catch the first train out for my early morning flight (about a twenty minute walk). But as the night progressed I realized that that plan was getting increasingly unrealistic, even if there weren't my bags to contend with. So around 2 AM I called to reserve a taxi to the bigger station. No, he couldn't come at 4:30, he was already booked up. Stupid small towns. He could do 3:30. Whatever. I wasn't sleeping anyway.

It turned out to be a van, a sort of shared ride thing. We had to pick up a lot of people, everywhere. He went around corners fast. I made it all the way to the train station, and even managed to pick up my bags before walking over to throw up discreetly in the bushes. By this time nothing but water. The taxi man walked over and looked at me with concern and distaste. I told him I wasn't drunk, just food poisoning and asked what I owed him. He said $20, which for a shared ride on a route that should take 10 minutes, was an extreme rip-off. I wasn't exactly in any shape to debate it though.

The train ride was better than I feared. Mostly I was just really thirsty. Security at the airport was much worse, a 40 minute wait in a crawling line. I hate flying United. I was so weak that moving my bags a few inches forward every minute or two was a major trial. Occasionally I sat down right on the floor and just inched forward on my ass. But I was worried that I would do something suspicious and make them think I was too sick to fly. Probably I was, but I just desperately wanted to get home.

The security guy when I walked through the metal detector did look rather suspicious. He said, Are you all right? I summoned my haughtiest, bitchiest manner and said, Yeah, I'm just totally exhausted!--with an accusing tone, as if it was his fault security was so slow etc. He lost interest fast.

After that things improved. I bought a bottle of sprite and drank it in small sips, which made me feel a lot better. The flight went fine although again much delayed. (Ground stop on the Chicago side due to nasty ice-storm.) When I finally got there, the train/bus ride home wore me out completely. But Pocket of Bolts was there (in a frenzy of worry) to take my bags from me and put me to bed and ply me with sprite and chicken soup.

The sprite and chicken soup were handy to have on hand, because PoB was himself coming down with something flu-like, and of course I caught it due to my weakened state. We basically stayed in bed for the next two days subsisting on saltines and soup, sprite, water, and advil. I even had a fever over a hundred. We did a lot of sleeping.

By the time we recovered, we barely had time to do our last minute Christmas shopping and packing before hitting the road again (yesterday), this time to fly out and have Christmas with PoB's mom's family. Travel and sickness have effectively eaten up the best hours of the past week and my interviews are looming.

It's all right here, at least reasonably relaxing. But today we were again pretty wiped out from the trip. We still had a bit more shopping to do and in the afternoon we tried to do some work. But it was an uphill battle, since we were a bit still headachy and bodyachy from the flu thing. Or maybe just from travel. We are both nervous about our interviews but too shaken out of our normal calm routines to do much in the way of preparation. Sometimes I think we should have just skipped Christmas altogether, just stayed home and got ourselves physically and mentally prepared ... but I guess that would have been sad.

Anyway, at least we went running today, offsetting some of our rather unvirtuous eating. We managed 25 minutes at a decent clip. Those gym-honed muscles are good for something after all. It's below freezing here, but at least not below zero as it is in Chicago. Even PoB did admit to being cold though ...

PoB's mom has a weird neurotic little dog, a year old now, who's a bit of a holy terror. Furious barking anytime anyone moves around in the house. She was very displeased at our arrival, barking and growling despite repeated reassurances. Now, we have been told, she has gotten used to us and is mostly treating us like she treats everyone else, barking loudly at the slightest relocation.

The only thing that stops her barking is picking her up and carrying her like a baby, which she of course very much enjoys. (I have resisted doing this, but PoB's mom is a pretty reliable vehicle.) Barking is an almost infallible way to attain this goal, so the conditioning's pretty well set. She is alternately fawned upon and scolded so much that neither reward nor punishment have any discernible effect on her. So, it is frustrating to try to interact with her. Any attempt to play with her (chew toys, tug of war, fetch) just leads to furious barking. She finds the activity more upsetting than interesting. Ugh. Both Pocket of Bolts and I have decided to try my parents' strategy of ignoring her barking so she'll know it won't work. Some success, pretty limited though; her patterns are pretty well set. Tomorrow we're going to try taking her running though. Supposedly exercise has a good effect on her. The whole thing reminds me of Nanny 911. They need Dog-Nanny 911.