The (ca) calamity of 2023 — a most bio-hazardous Valentine’s edition.

“I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees,” I tell my wife, bent over myself after she reminded me what a poor decision it was to challenge my stomach with a barbecued medium rare 2-lbs bone-in ribeye steak after spending two days in bed with a stomach bug.

Since my oldest started toddler care, she has brought home an impressive roster of viruses. For her mom and I, it has been alarming to see our youngest following suit and enrolling in all of the extracurricular diseases. Our oldest stayed home for three years during lockdowns, exposed to nothing, so she never got sick. We thought we had finally created an überfrau like Nietsche predicted someone would. We didn’t know that sending her to school would ruin that delusion.

Now we do everything in our power to skip whatever virus our daughters get, like inhaling corticoids, drinking bitter juices and elderberry, snorting mushrooms, culturally misappropriating indigenous health dances, and any other new hack and trick we see on TikTok.

Alas, we are never successful.

Inevitably we go down, and we know the exact moment we will go down because, for some hare-brained reason, we always say something that will mark our demise. When my wife calls me out on why I eat the kids’ food or kiss them when they are sick, I bring my finger to my forehead and tell her, “it’s all in the mind.” The next day I will wake up sick. For her, after days of my two daughters and I being sick, she will say, “I am the last holdout,” and that would be enough to make her sick the following day.

(Read the rest of this essay on Scribe.)

No sigma: (almost daily) ((always short)) (((NEVER long))) Reflections on art, risk, and creative recovery.

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