From my position on the couch, I watch the curtains gently rise and fall with the breeze; the light streaming in casts sunshine and shadows through the room in ways and in places I’d never seen before.
Outside cars sped up and down my street, eager to get from one stop sign to another as quickly as possible. I wondered what it must take before the city would install speed bumps.
You always think you’ll get so much done with an unscheduled day off. But when your body is fighting off a lethal pork-borne virus, one has a tendency to get a little lazy.
After a couple of hours it became clear that I merely had walking swine flu. So I rose from the couch, walked to the computer and did something I’d scoffed at others for doing. I signed on to Facebook.
I don’t know why I did it. I didn’t really want to. I’d always seen it as something for kids. Like teenage vampires, pants with chains and acne. A youthful fad.
When my wife joined and old acquaintances started popping up out of obscurity, I felt bad for all these people reaching out to faceless names from the past, those they hardly knew anymore.
Before long I was getting “friended” and “hugged,” “tagged” and “poked” by current friends and people I’d not talked to in 20 years or more. Sadly, none of this led to the kind of physical enjoyment one hopes for when these things happen in real life. People were sending me “drinks,” yet I remained painfully sober. Others wrote on my “wall” and didn’t bother to clean it up.
