faulty vision

Yesterday afternoon I took a thirty minute break from the office, under the firm conviction that spending another minute there would cause me to start drooling out of the corner of my mouth and twitching my left leg like an incontinent greyhound. A short drive away from work is a small mall, one of the fourteen hundred malls that pimple the face of Mountain View, which is otherwise not a bad little city. This particular mall has a Vietnamese restaurant called “New Tung Kee.” Once it was just the original and unique “Tung Kee,” until the brothers that owned it quarreled and separated, taking joint custody of the company name.

The Tung Kee, New and otherwise, are part of a chain that serves noodles of all types and shapes, provided said noodles are skinny yellow egg noodles or fat white rice noodles. The restaurants have a refreshingly honest approach to their business plan:  the faster we get you in and out, the more money we will make. Get out. For the most part, this suits Silicon Valley diners, who are usually in a hurry to be somewhere else no matter where they happen to be at that moment.

At New Tung Kee, every busboy is a waiter, and every waiter is a busboy. There is no assigned waiter to a group of tables, as is done in more civilized — if languid — eateries. At New Tung Kee, a patron gets one shot and one shot only at a waiter, and any further orders must be made through a competitive waiter-corralling exercise, wherein one literally reaches out and grabs a white-clad body dashing by. Eye contact at New Tung Kee does not work. Eye contact is for Europeans, who early in their evolution decided to waste entire millimeters of valuable facial real estate by growing big saucer eyes. With Asian waiters, it’s all about the fist to the passing groin or, in a pinch, the waving of the strangely monochromatic papers that Americans persist on calling money despite every economic indication to the contrary.

It was lunchtime anyway, so I headed to New Tung Kee for my regular meal, identified only on the menu as “#9: small, $4.25/large, $5.25″, with a picture on the border for clarification. The lunch crowd was over, so I waited for all of two seconds in the doorway before a busboy/waiter spotted me and peremptorily waved me over to the table he was cleaning. The menu was slammed down in front of me, and then he was gone.

And that’s when I realized he’d seated me next to a mime.

Not only was it a mime, it was a family of mimes, faces painted white and all. And not only were they mimes, they were foreign mimes, wearing the baggy Pierrot clown costumes imported from Europe. A little boy mime, a big daddy mime, and a delicate mommy mime, all dressed up like French people.

Even in the most stressful of days, there’s usually one moment of perfect contentment to help you survive everything else. Being seated next to a family of mimes was mine for the day. I beamed at the little boy mime and the big daddy mime and the delicate mommy mime, and in a rush of fellow human affection for them, leaned over the table to ask, “Excuse me for bothering you. If you don’t mind me asking, what vegetables are in your noodles?”

Mononucleosis showed up in my system as a pair of golf balls embedded under my jawline, a two-for-one special that squashed my throat between them and left it red and painful. Under the theory that misery is meant to be experienced in a place already fraught with misery, I wobbled back to work the next day and brooded at my desk, periodically making moaning sounds to frighten my coworkers.

During the course of the day, every member of my department poked a head over my cube wall, as though I were some quarantined specimen of exotic wildlife. None of them had anything useful to say.

“You look terrible,” some announced, each in turn. “Have you been to a doctor?”

“Your neck is fat,” the rest of them told me.

“I know,” I told the first group of inquisitive faces. “I’ve been to Kaiser. They say I don’t have strep.”

“Go away,” I told the others. “I hate you.”

It was Monday before I went back to the doctor, four days after the symptoms had started. By that point, I’d spread my germs over an entire quarter of the workforce, something I would’ve taken vengeful satisfaction over if I could’ve roused up enough energy to piece two thoughts together. By this point, the swelling had gone down marginally and the endless cups of hot camomile tea and honey that the Guy had been forcing down my throat, as well as the four fat bags of Ricolla he purchased at the local drugstore, had begun marching my sore throat down the ugly path of retreat.

My doctor-of-the-moment, a tough broad in charge of Patient Education at Kaiser, was unimpressed. “White patches in your throat. Go home for a week,” she decreed during my health care minute (all part of the Kaiser experience! We Care for You! ATM-medicine!) and wrote me out a doctor’s note for just that. “Just rest. You’ll be grateful you did it.”

I went home and yawned in the mirror, trying to locate white patches in my throat by pressing a flashlight against my cheek. I succeeded in creating a scene from Sixth Sense, but the white patches eluded my untrained eye. The next day, perversely enough, my sore throat disappeared, and even though I still looked like a dwarf hamster storing ping-pong balls in its cheeks, I diagnosed myself as completely cured. Despite the fact that I had absolutely no desire to be at work, no desire to see my coworkers, no desire to do work of any kind, my conscience poked me into emailing my office to inform them that I had mono but oh, I felt so much better. “Should I come in?” I wrote, kicking myself with every letter typed.

“Absolutely not,” the emphatic answer came. “Stay the hell away.”

I anticipated a week of rest and relaxation. What happened was a week of erratic work, doing support for our application, taking phone calls, editing documents, and struggling to stay awake in front of the rat-bastard web interface for office email, which demanded that the user click on a button every two seconds if desiring to be informed of any email that had come in.

I returned to work more exhausted than I left.

Five weeks later, I’m still exhausted. And gosh, my throat, it’s starting to swell up again….

You ever wake up in the morning, look around and think, “This is my life? What the hell happened?”

On Thursday — not last Thursday, mind, but the Thursday before the Thursday before the Thursday before the Thursday before that — the boyfriend finally had his wisdom teeth out. Just two of them, since only two were causing him trouble. I suppose that means that at some future date he’ll have to go through the entire painful process all over again. The appointment was set for first thing in the morning, which meant that I had to take the morning off from work. “If possible, have someone stay with the patient for the first four hours after the procedure.” Apparently, this was because some patients can have belated poor reactions to anaesthesia.

All set up in my hero complex, I imagined myself performing CPR on a lifeless Guy-corpse and dialing 911. (It took a few days for the teeth marks to fade on the Guy’s arm. He’s still a little puzzled about what brought on that particular attack of the munchies.) At 8 am that morning, I drove him down to the dentist’s office in Pi-man, sent him off into surgery with a kiss, and settled down in the waiting room to play with the Gameboy.

I’ve been battling Castlevania on that sucker for a while now, having initiated a deep and mutually dependent relationship during my long plane flight back from New York. My personal opinion is that somewhere in the Gameboy manual there should be a clearly worded notice to consumers: “WARNING. You will look like a nincompoop while playing.” Engaged in jumping and swatting and swinging and annihilating bad guys of all description, I neglected to notice that the buttons on the controller had a direct electrical connection to that part of my brain that controls personal dignity. It wasn’t until I actually kneed my neighbor in the ribs that I realized I’d been obsessively twitching with every jerk of my thumbs. Somewhere out there there is a plane’s worth of people that think I suffer from Tourette’s Syndrome.

Hell, as long as they don’t think I was some sort of terrorist.

I had this brilliant idea that next time I went on a plane trip I would paint the Gameboy a nice black color, then put a shutter of some sort over the screen. Given a little pocket taperecorder that occasionally sent out beeping sounds, and a flight uniform rental at a costume shop, I could probably manage to convince my next seat neighbor that I was controlling the plane from the cabin.

“Part of our new security measures, sir. We’ve transferred the cockpit to an undisclosed portion of the passenger cabin, and run the plane controls via a wireless hook-up. Sorry about the turbulence. I think the stewardesses are using the microwave. Boy, I hope nobody’s left a cell phone on.”

So, okay, this is a bit of a tangent. At any rate, I took the Guy to the dentist, they took out two of his wisdom teeth, and right about the time I got bored with the game and started reading a fascinating magazine article about President Bush (Sr.) and his belief in the honesty of the energy industry, one of the nurses came out to inform me that he was finished.

“Did he die?” I asked, because I felt obligated to ask.

She looked mildly offended. “No.”

“Told him so,” I said with satisfaction.

She led me through the hallways to the recovery room, giving me a short synopsis of the procedure en route. “He’s a feisty one,” she added as a side comment, steering me past a chamber of horrors where a white-faced girl was staring at the ceiling. “He’s already asking questions and wanting to know what everything is.”

“You should have used stronger drugs.”

We’d made our way to a large room with those rolling gurney-beds that clinics like so much. She drew back a curtain that closed off a section of the room, and voila, there was the Guy, looking like a stuffed chipmunk with a big white bandage around his head.

He was beeping.

“He’s a little bit out of it,” the nurse informed me. He looked it. There was a little alligator-clip thing attached to the end of his finger, which was the source of the beeping: a heart monitor set up next to the bed.

The Guy pried open an eye to peer at me. “Unha aa uu eh?”

“Like my old dwarf hamster,” I announced, and took a seat by his bed, carefully arranging my expression into one of deep and concerned sympathy.

“Uhn,” the Guy said firmly. The nurse proceeded to give me a demonstration on how to change the bandages in his mouth, talking over a constant stream of questions and random comments from the thoroughly drugged-up patient. Whatever they’d knocked him out with, it was some good stuff.

“This is a good time to ask him questions he wouldn’t tell you normally,” she advised me, after I discovered a darker, uglier side of my personality that actually found Drugged-Up Guy very, very funny. “He won’t even remember the question in the morning.”

“Do I dedt do deeb by dees?” the Guy asked again for the fourth time.

The nurse pottered away to tend to some other victim of oral torture; I held the Guy’s hand. He looked very small and sad under the sheets with his face wrapped up in white gauze. With his face wrapped up again, he’d lost the impetus to talk. Imagining that he was dozing, I spared a second to look around the room.

When I looked back, I discovered him very stealthily coaxing the alligator clip off of his finger. The beeping abruptly keened: FLATLINE! FLATLINE!

The nurse came skidding around the corner.

The Guy hastily closed his eyes and pretended to be sleeping while the nurse fiddled with the Beep Machine. “It’s a touchy thing,” she explained to me, apparently to assauge any fears I might have had that my boyfriend had, in fact, temporarily died. “Any little interruption in the beat makes it panic, and most people don’t have completely regular pulses in their fingers. No worries.”

“No worries,” I agreed dryly. “You should have used stronger drugs.”

I drove him home. The pamphlet they handed me informed me that I should stay with him for the next four hours to monitor his progress. I should change his dressings every thirty minutes. I should pick up his prescription for vicodin. I should use the little Capri-Sun knock-off bag given me and feed him water or fruit juice. I should vaseline his lips to make sure they didn’t get chapped.

He was chipper enough by the end of four hours to sit up and watch television. Me, I was required back at work, the Big Purple Brother. I sat down next to him on the couch and gingerly kissed his cheek. “I’m sorry I have to go,” I said apologetically. “I’ll take care of you when I get home. It’ll only be a few hours.”

“Unh,” said the Guy, happily, and squirted apple juice into his mouth.

The best laid plans of mice and men…

…I came home with mono.