Top Chef - Calling in Sick

This is a non-review of a show (Episode #2, which I missed), and a brief explanation as to why. I know it sounds ever so slightly blasphemous, but Top Chef this week had to be relegated to the the bottom shelf, as it were, in order to take care of some personal business.

Which means, no review.

Due to some kind of lost game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, I am here to report that I have just been through what can only be described as: Quite The Week! I am not sure what I did to deserve all of this karmic "attention" (punched a nun, perhaps, while sleepwalking) but within a period of six days, I had:

1) a day-and-a-half migraine that I was sure was going to escalate into either an aneurysm, or epilepsy,

2) some sort of 24-hour food-poisoning/stomach flu which could have been from any number of causes:
(a) It could have been from eating this grayish tired-old burger meat at some dive bar I had never been to before - and never will again. (Poison me once, shame on you; poison me twice, ...) Plus, their beer tasted disturbingly musty, but I rejected the idea of sending it back because the patrons were a little sketchy-looking and I didn't want to call any attention to myself as a "big sissy fag" who can't handle a little biological impurity. Basically, I think I was doomed from the moment I walked in.
(b) Or it could have been my body's rejection of my recent, overeager plan to consume homemade health shakes every day, which - quite possibly - might have been a little too enthusiastic in its assortment of "good for you" ingredients. (The questionable combination of Brewer's yeast and fiber powder immediately comes to mind.)
(c) Or maybe I just got a more "merciful" version of this weeks-long stomach flu that has been causing tons of people at my place of employ to swoon like aging hairdressers at a Celine Dion concert.

3) a good old fashioned head cold, which started about 4 days into this Job-like chapter of my life - which I totally attribute to my immune system being so significantly weakened by #1 and #2 above. I guess should feel lucky that all I got at this point was a cold. I mean, at the rate I was going, it would not have been surprising to have received a knock on the door from polio, or from rickets.

So, in the midst of my down-and-outness, of my lying on the couch for hours, just moaning, I received a happy break in the form of a phone call. It was from my friend Cayla: she was very excited to announce that she was getting married. I gave it my boy-in-the-bubble best to sound enthusiastic, to congratulate her, but I think instead I had the tone of a 80-year-old, on Day 2 of a liver transplant, gasping for water. But, despite lacking any measurable tone-of-voice, I was still able to muster the proper vocabulary of enthusiasm and to communicate my excitement.

So it turned out that Cayla had a project for me: she needed help - pronto! - on her wedding invitations, and she had heard that I have a skill or two with the computer, and with design. (God bless her, but she was also looking to turn these invitations around and mail them out within a week!) So we made plans to talk soon, when I was just a little less near death, and jump right on it.

Her call had come on Tuesday night, when I was still in the ecstatic throes of my intestinal invasion; it was still another two days before my head cold would flare up. So I whimped my way through the weekend, and we agreed to meet on Monday. But Monday did not work out, and Monday became Wednesday, which is when the second episode of Top Chef season #4 was airing.

As much as I would have loved to have stayed home to watch, and to report out to you, I had to help Cayla and Dirk (the lucky German groom). I mean, as much as I love a good TV show (and lazily lying on the couch), in the end friends have to come first. My friend Greg is a master of this ethic - he will drop anything to come and help you. He is only too happy to lend you his money, or to just sit and listen, or to just plain help you out. He'll gladly pick you up, or bail you out, or drop you off. And, after all of that, he'll still offer to be the one to drive when you're headed out on one of your long adventurous roadtrips together.

These days I am trying to be more like him, to pick up the bricks of this very simple truth and build them into the foundation of my life. Not to belabor the point, but I was a really really late bloomer. Really late. And because of this I feel horrendously frustrated pretty much all of the time, as if - no matter what I do - I am always still a good 10 years behind where I should be in basically every aspect of my life (house, career, money, relationships... have I forgotten anything?). So I know that sometimes this can make me come across as slightly guarded (or on a bad day, completely rabid) about my time, as if everyone in my life is trying to take it away from me.

But everything I read tells me that this way of thinking is wrong. Life achievements certainly matter, but people achievements are the only ones that count. I know this. I do. But I still feel years away from absorbing this, from making it as automatic as my breath. I want so badly to achieve things. To matter. It sometimes makes me crazy. But then I recognize the craziness and pick it up, and walk it out to the dumpster.

So when someone like Cayla calls, I make it a personal challenge to do everything I can. When the barking dogs of lack start howling and baying, I try to reassure myself that there will be plenty more time after the time that I give to my friends. Thankfully (and predictably) my friend Greg came along with me to help out with Cayla and Dirk's invites. It was a great evening, of ideas tossed around, of jokes and laughing, and -most importantly - of pizza and beer. It is an evening that never would have happened had a friend not dialed out for help and had we not answered. I have to remember this.

The invitations are done now - it only took another day - and we were pretty much elated to have accomplished so much in so little time. Cayla loves them. In the Rock-Paper-Scissors game of life, this one was a win: selflessness beating out whatever small and petty gremlin in me that might have kept me on the couch. At any rate, I was glad to have played a part.

Besides, I can always catch up on my missed episode of Top Chef next week, when I have a little more time.