Where I am not
When I was still a school-going child and happened to be sick, I would watch the clock all day long. At 9:52 I would imagine the rest of my classmates discussing Steinbeck, wondering what strange non-existent lessons they were pulling out. At 10:23 I would snuggle warmly in my bed, pleased that I was sick and not dressing out for PE like I would be on a normal day. At 11:34 I would agonize about the quiz I was missing in math and whether I'd be allowed to make it up or not. (Hey, grades were important.) At 12:31 I would wander to the kitchen and pour myself a glass of Sprite and grab a few crackers, glad that I didn't have to eat a mushed pb&j with eau de sandwich bag.
And so I spent my sick days, thinking about where I "should" be. (I never would have enjoyed ditching class.)
And now there is this weird thing called vacation but it is radically different than the vacation I used to know (also called Summer or Christmas vacation). For that kind of vacation, everything stopped. There wasn't some class or another that had an empty desk for me and there wasn't a stack of returned papers piling up because I wasn't there.
This new kind of vacation is somewhat like being sick only without spending all day in bed contemplating the wonders of Kleenex and saltine crackers. I can imagine hour by hour the activities going on around my empty desk and the letters filling my inbox... I suffer the vague temptation to visit our company website to see if, once again, our URL directs people to a Polish search engine... I think about calling the front desk and, with a disguised voice, asking for myself.
How sick is that? Maybe I need to go fetch myself a tall glass of Sprite.
And so I spent my sick days, thinking about where I "should" be. (I never would have enjoyed ditching class.)
And now there is this weird thing called vacation but it is radically different than the vacation I used to know (also called Summer or Christmas vacation). For that kind of vacation, everything stopped. There wasn't some class or another that had an empty desk for me and there wasn't a stack of returned papers piling up because I wasn't there.
This new kind of vacation is somewhat like being sick only without spending all day in bed contemplating the wonders of Kleenex and saltine crackers. I can imagine hour by hour the activities going on around my empty desk and the letters filling my inbox... I suffer the vague temptation to visit our company website to see if, once again, our URL directs people to a Polish search engine... I think about calling the front desk and, with a disguised voice, asking for myself.
How sick is that? Maybe I need to go fetch myself a tall glass of Sprite.
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