Weeknotes 237

What I most dislike about being ill is the deadening sensation of waiting for time to pass. There’s nothing useful you can do, just metabolise while the tiny machines in your bloodstream busy themselves with the real work, not needing your input.

My positive COVID result last Sunday came from a test kit more than a year past its expiry date. I probably shouldn’t have trusted it but I convinced myself that an expired kit is more likely to produce a false negative than a false positive. Anyway, I got a fresh box of kits delivered on Monday and I’m using those now. I also took the opportunity to bin a stack of expired kits from the shelf where they’d sat unopened since I’d preemptively ordered them when they were being sent out for free. Sorry, taxpayers.

The COVID wasn’t too bad this time. Mostly aches and sneezes, and only a smattering of those racing hypnagogic thoughts that accompany a fever, which for me always involve grappling with an intractable anxiety-inducing problem like a nonsensical programming task or a fraught social situation with no peaceable resolution.

I took a sick day on Monday and spent the rest of the workweek clicking on unread emails and messages in a daze of mild brain fog. The temperature outside slowly rose until it hit 31 °C on Friday. I’ve worked under these conditions before but it felt doubly unpleasant to be stuck at home sweating when I could’ve been sat in an air-conditioned office if only I’d been healthy. It wasn’t a super productive return from holiday if I’m honest.

I’m relieved the gutters were clean so I could open the windows. Small mercies.

My latest test was negative and it’s been more than five days so I’m ready to return to the world of the living.

After all of June’s progress, it’s back to square one on the fitness. Turns out that pasta, COVID and sitting aren’t the recipe for good health I was hoping for. I’d like to get back to the gym regularly starting… tomorrow, I suppose? Ugh.

And so I haven’t done anything this week except work, eat and sleep. Oh, except I did rewatch the first season of Succession — probably my fourth go? — which gets better and rings truer each time I see it. The fading delirium of illness intensified the hypnotic effect of Nicholas Britell’s score, the thundering bass and jangling piano carrying me away, transported to another reality, through the city, underwater, above the clouds, buffeted by complicated airflow.