Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Parties, pills, puking and parenting


Feels like I’ve gone to the lab at the university where undergraduates get to create new hallucinogenic drugs to sell to their buddies, and, as part-time work, stick samples of rampant super-viruses in test tubes, and watch them turn different colours.

The hell that is a nuclear family in winter is this: Somebody on the ground floor of the building coughs, and microscopic spores are sucked into the vents. In what would be an amazingly short amount of time, if it wasn’t so lethal, they arrive on my upper lip, jostling for space amongst the random grey hairs which appear to grow hydroponically these days in my nostrils.

Having been inhaled, they go straight to my throat and chest, and hold little gossip-sessions in my joints. I feel bad. I go home, crash, and go back to work within a few hours.

The problem is this: One child will spontaneously, and colourfully, sneeze the contents of their head all over their breakfast. Their temperature will shoot up to something our crappy flawed thermometer fails to register. Their eyeballs will roll around in their heads like an exorcist extra, and they will slump to the floor.

At which point Neen and I will have to negotiate who has the least amount of hell to mine at work, or else drag the father-in-law out of bed, so that the sickly kid isn’t left to chew their fingers down to the knuckles, or develop a weird fetish such as ingesting their own hair.

By the end of the day, they’ll be fine, but then it will be child number two’s turn. You get the picture. Any of these kinds of illnesses work like this- a family of five can be out of commission for a month. And Neen and I end up taking leave from work to sit around watching daytime TV.

These colds and things are dreadful, but one step down from the entire family having a stomach bug, simultaneously. We have one toilet. You can boil your hands in oil, but if one of us gets sick, we all will.

By the time we are more or less healthy, we have so much washing to catch up with, that we don’t leave the house. We don’t visit other families for fear of passing on the viruses and plagues. We live alone, encrusted in our snot, our skin covered in sores, our house a place of quarantine marked with a biohazard symbol.

I guess now would be a bad time to suggest a wild Cape Town blogging-community party? It seems the Joburgers have a regular thing going on, but we in Cape Town have only our mountain to brag of, and that gets a bit anti-social after a while. “Suuuure, we have no life, no friends- but check out that mountain!”

Any takers?

8 comments:

  1. Aw now I wanna come to a Cape Toen bloggy-party!!!
    I hope you're all better quick-like!

    ReplyDelete
  2. @angel I dunno if it will happen- I'm trying to find out if these things have happened, or if it is just the 27dinners. Hmmmm. Surely we can't be that antisocial?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oooooh, a blog party! Yay. You organising? Just come in a bubble, or one of those space suits. We don't want whatever it is that you lot have got, or had, or will have ... :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. PS
    27dinners are boring. If you are organising, please go one better ...

    ReplyDelete
  5. I'm always amused at your tags. There over 526 000 listings for "social snot" at Google. I just checked. You don't even make the top 20, more's the pity ... :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. @SMP: Distinctly underwhelming response to offer. I'd happily organise a venue for some informal thing- not too keen on the hardcore social networking 27 thing, either.
    I'll see if I can get some more interest from people...
    And source a bubble suit.

    ReplyDelete
  7. @Caz: So, we have you, SMP and me. Better start practising some funny stories! :-)

    ReplyDelete

Say something! It can't be worse than what I have said. Note: Sometimes you have to press 'comment' twice. Stupid comments thingy.