Still sick

I've often thought that low-grade cold bugs are one of the worst ways to be sick. Don't get me wrong, the relative lack of symptoms is nice - I can take the occasional coughing fit and generalized feeling of run-down-ness if it means I can breathe and swallow properly. But that very same lack of symptoms makes it feel less like an out-and-out illness and more just a failing of character, as it were. You know you could get a start on that pile of housework that's waiting for you, if you really needed to, but it's so much cosier wrapped up in a blanket. You know you could get to the grocery store, but it just seems like such a long walk. And even though you might know objectively that this lethargy is a sign that your body's using all its energy fighting off invaders, and thus you should help it by continuing to rest, our culture has such a strongly engrained sense of "you work unless you absolutely can't" that it's hard not to judge yourself simply lazy. (Unless you're in the sort of financial situation where you can't afford to miss the work. Then you just suck it up and go in, and hope to God you don't end up with pneumonia.)

It's probably not surprising I'm ill right now; there's the "going from a rural area to a crowded urban environment" thing, the "going from a hot dry environment to a chilly humid environment" bit, and the good old-fashioned "stressed out from moving across the country and everything that entails", any one of which will make someone likelier to contract infectious diseases. And I'm lucky enough that I'm not in the aforementioned financial situation, and can take as much time (and tea with honey, and Emergen-C, and NyQuil) as I need to get better.

But I'm still finding it no end of frustrating that, on this most recent leg, I'm only getting better incrementally. Sure, the bulk of the moving is over with, but there's just so much that needs doing. We need to get to the DMV to get the car registered. I need to take my guitar in for an adjustment. I want to get the last bookcase put together and my reading nook arranged and the books unpacked and the art hung on the walls and the boxes put in storage. I'd like to start looking for work, or at least some volunteer opportunities. I have things I want to mail to people, and groceries that need buying, and I need to find a new hairstylist and a place to go work out. And yet I feel like I'm barely treading water - by the time I do the most basic stuff to keep the house clean and myself fed, I'm so tired I just want to take a nap. And every time I start to get better, I get to cross one or two things off my list and think maybe, just maybe, this is the start of the upswing...and then I get ill again, and more crap keeps piling up.

So this is me whining. It's not fair. Pout. Pout.

Also please let me be up for a Costco trip this weekend. If only to get out of the house.