notes from the sick room.

It's been a pretty weird, sick week around the Canada Street homestead. I've been ferrying myself back and forth between work and doctor's offices and occasionally video stores, spending upwards of one hundred dollars on herbal remedies for my various maladies, and crafting a Google search history that very closely resembles a badly-researched Cosmo article ("antibiotics and alcohol," "birth control and irresponsible decisions," and so on). I can say with complete certainty that there is no worse feeling than lying on the couch trying not to die as the warm spring sun shines down in the clear blue sky outside your window. The good news, however, is that I have crafted an airtight personal care package for surviving both spring fever and cabin fever at the same time.

1. Game of Thrones. I am so, so, SO not a fantasy person, but my WORD this is an excellent series. Compelling characters, gorgeous scenery, incredibly addictive plots, and the hottest gentlemen in the British empire. I'm so lucky to have nerds in my life who force me to watch things.

2. Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan. This wonderful essay collection saved my life this week. It is so full of completely perfect sentences that I cannot choose just one to quote, but here is one passage, about reality television:

“People hate these shows, but their hatred smacks of denial. It's all there, all the old American grotesques, the test-tube babies of Whitman and Poe, a great gauntlet of doubtless eyes, big mouths spewing fantastic catchphrase fountains of impenetrable self-justification, muttering dark prayers, calling on God to strike down those who would fuck with their money, their cash, and always knowing, always preaching. Using weird phrases that nobody uses, except everybody uses them now. Constantly talking about 'goals.' Throwing carbonic acid on our castmates because they used our special cup annd then calling our mom to say, in a baby voice, 'People don't get me here.' Walking around half-naked with a butcher knife behind our backs. Telling it like it is, y'all (what-what). And never passive-aggressive, no. Saying it straight to your face. But crying...My God, there have been more tears shed on reality TV than by all the war widows of the world. Are we so raw? It must be so. There are simply too many of them-too many shows and too many people on the shows-for them not to be revealing something endemic. This is us, a people of savage sentimentality, weeping and lifting weights.”

I am such a sucker for smart, culturally aware essayists. He writes about Axl Rose, Christian rock festivals, his brother's narrow escape from death, and MTV's The Real World, and it is all beautiful and brilliant.

3. Would It Kill You To Stop Doing That? by Henry Alford. This book is about manners and etiquette in the modern age, and it is sharp, bright, snappy, and sympathetic. Also, observant and funny as hell. Alford has this incredible way of unpacking behaviour we engage in every day to reveal just how self-centred and thoughtless we are, and also how fervently we justify our complete lack of regard for other people by claiming it's just the way things work now. Choice sentence: "You need spend only a month or two on Facebook before encountering the eight saddest words in the English language: 'Mark Ekmann has commented on his own photo.' " You will laugh, and you will see yourself in these ridiculous anecdotes, and you will become a more considerate citizen.

4. Somebody to Love, by Queen. Best played over and over as you lie on the floor willing your poor sad self back to life. Oh hell yes.