The GeekHiker

(I’m still a bit sick and my writing skills are in the toilet, but here’s a few poorly-written random tidbits anyway…)

There’s something about being sick that makes me very… melancholy. Don’t know why. Maybe it has something to do with spending half the night coughing and hacking.

I’m not usually one to complain about a simple cold but, damn, this one has kinda thrown me for a loop. Not the cold so much as the above mentioned cough. Last night I didn’t get to sleep til sometime past 3, and woke up at ten. How on Earth I’m going to reset my clock for work is beyond me.

Aw, shucks. Maybe I’ll just have to take another day off work. Darn.

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Ever notice when you take a day or two off the web, all the bloggers you read post like crazy? Took four hours to catch up! Heh.

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Have you ever had a box of old papers, magazines, and the like, just sitting around? A box filled with stuff that, while you know you want to keep some of it and throw most of it away, you need to find the time to sit down and actually go through it, piece by piece?

Never quite managing to find the time, the box just ends up being shoved into a corner somewhere?

And do you ever think to yourself “the next time I’m home sick, I’ll sit down and go through that darn box”?

Okay, maybe that’s just me.

So I took Thursday and Friday off to be sick, and did I go through the box? Hell, no. Instead I watched movies. And slept. And hacked up a lung or two. And watched some really bad television.*

I figure I’ve got a job that gives me the sick time, I may as well use it effectively, right? (Wow, do I ever not miss jobs with no sick time, where I had to go in! Those of you that do, you have my empathy.)

The real negative to the whole thing is that I had to back out of a planned hike Saturday. I won’t say where it is (maybe I can do it later this summer), but it’s still depressing. It was going to be my first really, really good hike since the knee got better.

Bah, I’m having a terrible hiking year so far, aren’t I?

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In other news, the girlfriend of the neighbor stopped by today. She hasn’t seen him in days and wants me to call her if he comes home. She’s apparently worried that he’s going to do something, shall we say, stupid. She’s convinced as well that, if she can just get a hold of him, she can “fix” everything.

I took her number, but only begrudgingly. I was actually rather cold to her about the whole situation.

Those of you who’ve known me for a while know that I’m usually very sympathetic to people, to whatever hardship people are going through. I’m not the type of guy who thinks to myself bitterly, “Yea! I may be single, but they’re going through hell! Sweet!”. Not exactly me.

But, dammit, I just can’t seem to come up with a lot of empathy here. She was looking for it, clearly, but after six months of listening to this crap, being woken up late at night, the screaming, crying and glass-breaking, and finally the cops last weekend, I find whatever shred of sympathy I had for them or their troubles has simply evaporated.

I find I just don’t care, and I sure as hell don’t want to be involved. And while I certainly hope the guy doesn’t hurt himself (as she seems to believe), I find this whole other side of me thinking “dammit, he’s an adult…”

Does that make me a heartless bastard, or am I just looking out for my best interests here?

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* In my defense, I only lasted about 10 minutes. Once she started seeking a boar to impregnate her pet pig, who was in heat, I found that I just couldn’t, uh, relate to those sorts of difficulties…