June 2004 Archives

I was sick as a dog a couple of weekends ago. I've got a stomach of cast-iron generally, which makes bouts of gastroenteritis always unexpected and particularly unpleasant. This particular bout struck at 2am; I consider myself lucky that I was able to get to the bathroom before I started puking. I was up again at 4am -- more puking -- and sent my out-sick e-mail then.

This is all far more than you ever needed to know about my recent illness; suffice it to say I didn't eat anything for a couple of days, then subsisted on soup and fruit for a couple more. I was feeling mostly well again the following week when I chanced upon an article in the campus newspaper. Turns out, there were other sick people that weekend, as well, many of whom had eaten at Chipotle the week before. Chipotle -- where I'd eaten a vegetarian burrito for lunch on Wednesday.

Any doubt that remained was squelched by another article, printed yesterday. Twenty-six customers who ate at Chipotle on Wednesday reported getting sick. I didn't report it, so I'd make number 27, and I'm sure there are others, as well.

Each of the 26 cases became ill two days after eating at Chipotle and had similar symptoms of vomiting and diarrhea, said Valadez. All patients tested positive for the norovirus, a group of viruses that causes gastroenteritis, which leads to irritation and inflammation of the digestive tract.

Two days, of course, is enough time to make you forget what you might've eaten that made you ill. What I ate the night I got sick was a frozen mushroom pizza. Needless to say, I haven't been hungry for pizza or mushrooms since that weekend -- puking mushrooms out my nose tends to curb my appetite a bit. Ironically, since so much time had passed between eating at Chipotle and getting sick, I didn't really have any bad mental associations with the restaurant at all. ...Until I read this:

"It's called fecal-oral spread," said Ginger Bloomer, a UHS physician who treated the seven initial students. "There are microscopic amounts of the virus on the employee's hands after they have used the bathroom, it gets on the food, and now you eat it."

Yuck.

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

I wish I could say that I had moral objections to Reagan and his flawed national policies from Day One of his eight-year term in office. The truth is, when Ronald Reagan came to power was inaugarated to office on January 20, 1981, I was four years old.

When I was six or seven, I wrote President Reagan a letter. I don't remember the contents of the letter, but the gist of it was probably something like this:

Dear President Reagan,
How are you? How is Mrs. Reagan? I am fine. I love America. Please write back.
Love,
Rachel

I was thrilled 4-6 weeks later when I received a bulky envelope in the mail from the white house. Inside was the standard press packet that interns send to wide-eyed, fan-letter-writing children. There was even a 5x7 print of a photo of President and Mrs. Reagan, with an automatically-drawn signature in the corner. It was impressive, in my six-year-old estimation, but not enough to make a loyal young Republican of me. (Somewhere in middle America, I'm sure there was a teenybopper with the same photo framed and hung in a place of honor on the wall next to her life-sized poster of Kirk Cameron.)

The Reagan presidency served as a backdrop for close to a decade of my formative years. Reagan was in office when I was eight or nine years old and wondering how I managed to be so lucky to have been born in the (greatest, most powerful, most prosperous -- fill in the blank) country in the world.

In that sense, I mourn for a piece of my childhood lost, but I've long since lost the naivete that made me believe that words from powerful men are always true. I didn't know that you could fight a war without ever declaring one; the only war I ever heard Reagan declare was on drugs. I didn't know that words not spoken could be as powerful as those that are. I didn't know that the most powerful man in the world could be a nothing more than a charismatic figurehead. In the days following his death, people have been throwing around superlatives like "greatest president of the twentieth century," and what I've pieced together of his actions hardly supports such hyperbole.

It was President Reagan's charisma that struck me the most as a child growing up, that during the golden years before the Iran-Contra scandal blew up, in every interview and every press event he gave, he played the part of a president -- regal, amiable, grandfatherly. When I was eight or nine, that was enough to earn my respect, if not my (rather worthless at the time) political support. It was enough to earn the admiration of a whole generation of neo-conservatives who followed him into public office, and that doesn't give me quite the warm-fuzzy feelings that "morning in America" might have.

And truthfully, when he told the world that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, I felt genuinely bad, as one might for some distant cousin with a terminal disease -- disengaged, but curiously concerned. If, as Douglas MacArthur once said, "old soldiers never die, they just fade away," so then do old presidents. We were spared watching Reagan fade and grow older -- the flag-covered coffin is the last image any of us will have. It's a fitting end, perhaps, for a president for whom appearances were so vital.

There's a song that's been stuck in my head, and I've been trying to learn to play it on my guitar, which I seldom play. I wish I could play as facilely as my dad does, but I'm not really willing to devote the time to practice, so I suppose I deserve the sore fingers and cramping hand and the ongoing frustration. There's a fingerpicking pattern that goes with it: 5-2-3-1-2-4-2-3, over and over again. I can feel the strings beneath my fingers in my mind, but my hands don't always do as I ask them. But anyway.

It's been a lonely day. The person I want to talk to most has been inaccessible since morning, which only serves to frustrate me. Luckily, I've been practicing entertaining myself, wandering about town in the evenings to take pictures or walk or whatever. This evening, I took the new camera and tripod down to the Congress Avenue Bridge, only to find that my battery was dying. I don't have a spare yet.

It was disappointing, because the sunset was shaping up to be lovely, and the sky was clear, not hazy like it was the other afternoon when I was out and about with my camera. And the bats. I could hear the bats... I could smell the bats... but I left before the bats came out from the bridge. There were people camped out on the lawn waiting for them, but I was mad about forgetting to recharge my battery, so I left.

I'm hoping the sunset is nice tomorrow night, as well. I need to keep myself busy for as long as possible.