Sick Day

I almost forgot to update the blog, because today I'm engaged in serious combat.

I woke up with nothing more than a tickle in my throat and a general feeling of malaise.  However, as the day goes on, I find it's trying harder and harder to turn itself into a full-blown head cold.  This cannot stand.  I battle on.  My enemy is wily, but I am determined to emerge victorious from this conflict.

This entry is, therefore, the blog equivalent of what TV Tropes refers to as a Sick Episode.  Tomorrow I'll be back to Working Through The Cold.  But for today, since I don't have to be anywhere or do anything absolutely compelling, I've decided to just take it easy.  Unfortunately, the husband person still had to go to work and was thus unable to spend his day fussing over me.  (This of course implies that he would have done such a thing if he were home, which I think most people realize is unlikely, but I can cling to my fantasies.)

In between brief bouts of semi-unconsciousness, I'm amusing myself by wandering around several of my favorite websites.  For lack of being coherent enough to share anything else with my readers, I thought I'd pass these on to you.  Have a great weekend and stay healthy - but if you're stuck in bed with a laptop, give these a try.

• TV Tropes (world's greatest time sink)
• xkcd (nerdy webcomic full of stick figures, science jokes, and pop culture references)
• Tumblr (I'm still new to this so I don't know how to describe it)
• Manly Guys Doing Manly Things (a silly video game-inspired webcomic my sister got me into)
• Not Always Right (funny and bizarre tales of adventures in customer service)

I Built This Entry on Faux Rock and Roll

As I've mentioned in another post, many of the things I've learned in 34 years which have actually stayed with me are things I was taught by video games. I realize how odd and possibly pathetic that makes me sound, but when I started this blog I promised to be honest. I never promised to be interesting or relevant.

In addition to the lessons I outlined in that post, another one I've absorbed is that it's a very, very good thing that I never had any unfulfilled ambitions to become a rock star. If I ever needed confirmation of this, I get it every time my friends Jess and Andrea and I play Rock Band. Together we are known as "The Real Babes."

I will pause this narrative while the readers who have actually met me laugh themselves sick at this concept. In my/our defense, it was one of the names randomly suggested by Andrea's game system, and we ended up keeping it. (I wanted us to be the Blind Bridesmaids.)

We had previously played the game, several times in fact, with our church's youth group, of which I at one time was the advisor. This was an entertaining experience because we all kept having to take turns, and because many of us ended up with bleeding ears after one boy attempted to hold a tune on Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance." To be fair, I myself probably sound more like I'm summoning an Eldritch abomination than singing when I attempt that song. However, it's less humiliating than singing "Poker Face" in front of an assemblage of church youth. Apparently, my face contorts into some moderately horrified expressions when I sing about "bluffin' with my muffin" while being watched by a group of teenagers.

I can, however, achieve 100% perfection on "Still Alive," from the video game Portal, even when I change the lyrics to suit whatever's going on at the moment. We discovered that when two of the kids arrived for our jam session while I was halfway through the song. ("I've experiments to run, there is someone at the door, la la la la la la still alive.")

A few hours of rocking out in my living room seemed like a great way to entertain ourselves while the remnants of Tropical Storm Nicole wandered through our vicinity this past summer, so we hooked up the system and awoke our avatars. Jess is our designated drummer, but she hadn't been feeling well and didn't participate quite so much, so it was mostly Andrea and myself. Andrea, on the guitar, sported long spiky red hair, a jagged vampire cape, and black undereye makeup like clown tears, all of which I can attest she does not have in real life. I was on lead vocals with shaggy black hair, an hourglass figure sandwiched into skinny jeans, and an embarrassing tendency to kick the air whenever the performance was good. The hair is mostly accurate.

The reason I was on lead vocals is because it's the only aspect of the game at which I do not suck. I'm a terrible guitarist and an even worse drummer, thanks to an inconsistent level of hand-eye coordination. I'm not a great singer either, but given a large enough bucket I can carry a tune, and what I lack in actual skill I make up for with volume. For some reason I've forgotten, the Real Babes are a London-based band, so we started performing there and hoped to unlock the rest of Europe's major cities.

This was not easy but it was absurdly fun. I'm almost ten years older than Andrea, and was a child in the 80s, so I remember when songs like "Eye of the Tiger" and "Hungry Like a Wolf" received actual airtime on the radio as part of a normal playlist rather than some kind of retrospective. After unlocking Paris and blaring our way through "Livin' On a Prayer," we found ourselves able to hire a manager, who turned out to be "your mom." A woman who looked like neither of our mothers appeared on the screen, offering us a pair of clean underwear.

It just got progressively weirder from there. Victory in a band competition earned us a run-down van that looked like it could have been a Civil War ambulance. We acquired a merchandising expert, a girl who, the game gleefully informed us, spent her free time attempting to make out with one of us.

"Yeah, that's not awkward or anything," said Andrea. "Or, you know, illegal." The girl in question looked to be about fifteen years old.

"Maybe she's the bassist's girlfriend." The game had supplied us with a computer-generated bassist whose major purpose seemed to be stumbling around onstage, like my husband trying not to trip over the cat in the middle of a dark room.

We completed another set, congratulating each other on the five-star performance rating, and waited to see what rewards we might have unlocked. A trophy -- the "You Killed the Radio Star" award! Two new venues! And hanging in our closet, the greatest prize they had to offer...a new pair of pants?

"Are you serious? A new pair of pants?"

"More laundry for our mom to do?" I suggested. "It says that part of her duties as our manager is to make sure we have clean laundry."

"And to protect you from zombie makeup," she replied.

"No zombies!" During one of our previous jam sessions, I had left the room for five minutes and come back to find that one of the youth group kids had changed my appearance. I had gone from a relatively normal-looking avatar, who even bore some slight resemblance to my real-life appearance, to being decked out in what was supposed to be zombie makeup, with black blood dripping from my mouth. This was tolerably cool in concept, but the actual look of the whole thing just made me seem like a messy eater with a fondness for grape juice.

"Speaking of zombies..." She pressed the button to select the next song.

"You're really going to make me sing that?"

"Should I change your makeup first?"

"No, no...I'm good."

With a sigh, I picked up the microphone. I know it's just a song, but it always makes me feel...bizarre.

All we wanna do is eat your brains
We're not unreasonable
I mean, no one's gonna eat your eyes...

"All We Wanna Do Is Eat Your Brains" is by Jonathan Coulson. I can't sing it without being a little squicked out. Possibly because it's being sung by a newly-made zombie to his former co-worker, and I know I've worked with a few people who seemed like they would be interested in eating my brains. Then again, I guess many of us have felt that way.

Cheating Death in the Eaves

As I mentioned in another post, I spent five years as the secretary of a church, and had entirely more than my fair share of misadventures during that period. Since my friends apparently wish I actually would sit down and put them all into a book (and perhaps I will after all, in the future), it seems only fair that I offer another example of something that happened to me during those five years. So today I'll tell you about the time the church building tried to kill me.

I frequently found myself handling tasks that were not necessarily part of my job description, simply because no one else was able or available to do them. One of these involved the annual inspection of our smoke detectors. Someone had to escort the inspector(s) through the building, unlocking doors as needed so they could get into all the rooms and test the detectors. The detector inspectors -- wait, wasn't that a character in the old Speed Racer cartoon? -- would take up the better part of my day with this particular project, but usually I was the only one who could do this, for one reason or another.

A few years ago, this had nigh disastrous consequences.

As I mentioned in the post linked above, the church no longer has a bell proper; it plays a carillon on the designated hours. But it does still have a bell tower, which is accessed in only one way. You must climb up to the sanctuary balcony and unlock the door to a storage room. Inside the storage room is a set of stairs that looks like it's built out of kindling and matchsticks. Climb these and push open the heavy oak door in the ceiling. This leads to the lower part of the bell tower, and from there you can move in two directions -- up the stairs to the tower proper, or east, through another small heavy door that leads to the eaves above the sanctuary.

This lower section of the tower is more than a little creepy. The church had a massive fire years ago, and this is the only part of the building that still shows evidence, in the form of scorch marks on the old stone walls. It's dark, it's filthy, and it's very cold. And of course, the annual inspection takes place in February.

I tell you all that to tell you this. About three years ago, I was escorting the detector inspector on his annual tour of the building. The time came for us to climb the stairs to the lower section of the bell tower, because some of the smoke detectors are out in that section above the sanctuary. Because I have a crippling fear of heights, I never went into the eaves themselves, but would take the inspector as far as the lower tower, and wait by the door. This inspector happened to be the same one as the year before, and he somehow actually remembered that I was afraid, so he encouraged me to stay downstairs while he went up into the lower bell tower by himself.

I watched from the lower landing as he climbed the rickety stairs, pushed open the door in the ceiling, and disappeared into the black. There was a pause. "I can't find the light switch."

"It should be right there on the wall." I imagined him feeling the wall and disturbing the cobwebs, and shuddered. Ew. I don't mind spiders, just their webs.

"Not finding it. This is weird, I could swear it was right here."

Puzzled, I decided to ignore my fear of the eaves and go up and help him. "Hang on," I told him, and headed up the stairs.

Remember that door in the ceiling that I mentioned? The oak door? We called it the door but it was really nothing more than a huge honking plank of wood, about two feet wide and four feet long. No doorknob, no hinges. You push this thing up and essentially prop it against the wall to hold the space open. There's a rope handle on the upper side, so if it falls shut while you're in the tower you can get it open again, but that's the only fixture.

As I approached the opening, the door-plank decided to fall shut. I looked up and saw thirty pounds of solid oak rushing toward my face. (Why did it fall shut? No idea. In hindsight, I've just come to the conclusion that gravity hates me. Other stories that I plan to tell in this blog will bear out my theory.)

I spent a few nanoseconds watching my life flash before my eyes. Then I spun around, dropped into the fastest crouch you ever saw, and covered my head with my arms. I heard the slam of the door falling into place about three inches from my ear. Clouds of chalky white dust billowed up around me. As I slowly stood up and came to the stunning realization that I wasn't dead or even severely injured, the door was yanked open by the white-faced inspector, who apparently was convinced that I must have been one or the other.

"Are you all right?!"

"I think so." Aching, yes; I'd managed to wrench my back by spinning and crouching so fast. Annoyed, yes; I'd gotten dust in my contact lenses. Filthy and in need of a shower, yes. But overall, unharmed. I waited while he finished his inspection of the eaves, then returned with him to my office to complete the year's paperwork.

The property manager came by a little later. I was sitting calmly at my desk, sipping a Coke and waiting for the painkillers to kick in, trying to look nonchalant. He did a double take when he saw me and inquired whether I realized I was going prematurely gray. I explained what happened, and he turned pale.

Come to think of it, that was the last time I provided the inspector's escort through the building.