Blue Feels Blue

Hi, team... looks like today I'm down for the count with some kind of stomach bug. It may have been related to a recent trip to the movie theater and the fact that I purchased movie-theater-nachos. (When I ordered them, the woman behind the counter handed me a plastic container full of chips and directed me to a self-serve "cheez" machine against the wall, where I was to squirt out my own orange-colored, room-temperature goo.)

I felt badly enough to stay home from temping, which -- when one considers I didn't miss a moment of work when I had Neha's flu, or the day after I got my India vaccinations and I was sitting in my cube shivering and trying to adjust to four different low-grade virus strains -- means I must be feeling pretty darn awful.

(I am the sort of person who doesn't vomit well. My sister, who grew up getting carsick, pukes in stride; I generally crumple to the floor and cry out for higher powers to "make it stop.")

But my inner critic keeps rearing its ugly head, to remind me of my current low status in both the economic and working worlds, and to ask why I am claiming a privileged status (that is, taking a "sick day") when I have not yet earned that privilege (that is, having a job which offers paid sick days).

In short, it's reminding me that plenty of working people drag themselves to work when they are far sicker than I am; and, as 50 percent of American workers do not have paid sick leave, there is no reason for me to expect that I ever will, even when I move on to a job beyond temping.

My inner critic is saying "get out of bed and get yourself into that office, if only to practice for the future."

After all, losing a day's pay is losing a day's pay ($48, in my case, after taxes) and I can't justifiably say that I don't need the money, not when I have a plane ticket to Hyderabad I've got to pay off.

But I've also slept about fourteen hours out of the last seventeen, and even drinking water makes my stomach spin.

So chalk me up as a member of the Entitlement Generation. I'm staying home.

(Editor's Note: It did occur to her that if she could quantitatively prove that it was the movie theater nachos that made her ill, she could sue the theater and recoup her $48. But she's never sued anyone before, and she leaves the country in a matter of days. So she'll go back to sleep and hope for the best.)