Culminating in thirty minutes spent searching for video clips of Michael Phelps, my week of horizontality is officially over.

I’m an asterisk.  Last week I arrived home from a great trip to San Francisco and moved around the house in slow, heavy stomps.  Walls quivered as I leaned on them, faucets sweat as I gripped them, and couches groaned as my croaking mass of influenza lay sedentary for eight days.

I never got tested for H1N1 for a couple of reasons, all of them unacceptable.  First, since I’m new to this area, I haven’t found a doctor yet.  The thought of actually finding a doctor when you’re sick is daunting, and when you’re healthy, it’s boring.  I lay on the sofa sweating and the only doctors that I could think of were those that practice sedation dentistry.  Second, if I did have swine flu, I didn’t want to have to tell people I had it.  The new girl has swine flu. It would have ruined me at recess.  I will remain neatly tucked inside one of the sixty degree angles in the asterisk of H1N1 total cases.  If you read me in eight point font on the bottom of the page you’ll find out that I’ve done my part to widen the error bars for epidemiologists.

Don’t blame me, blame feta cheese.  It all began on my trip back from San Francisco when I boarded my delayed and twice switched flight from Chicago to Grand Rapids with a Greek salad I grabbed at O’Hare.  United smooshed me in a middle seat but with only 24 minutes of flying time I didn’t really care.  I ate what I thought was an innocent meal quietly in the darkened aircraft as we waited to push away from the gate.

The flight attendant walked slowly down the aisle and did a double take at our row.  She looked at me, “can you lift up your salad?”  “Lift it up?” I slowly raised it a few inches above my lap.  She leaned down in slow motion and took a big, strong, SNIFF.

“Yep, It’s your salad!”  She exclaimed while executing a perfect ‘bend and snap’ recoil for the now quiet aircraft that contains six of my new co-workers scattered about.

“Excuse me?”

“Your salad.  Your salad smells like throw up.  Someone said they thought they smelled throw up, but it’s your salad. The throw up smell is coming from your salad.”  Her proclamation was crisp each time she rephrased it.  I was sitting face to face with one of the life opportunities that you look back on with a thousand good things you could have, should have done.  Not wanting to ruin the moment the way she had ruined my dinner, I unbuckled and stood up half way in my chair:  “Don’t fear folks, it’s just feta.”  Silence.  At least I’d tried.

I ate a few more bites of throw up salad before closing it and shoving it in the seat pocket.  The short flight meant they didn’t come around to pick up trash, so I carried the scarlet letter off with me in a great display of not making eye contact with others.  The next day I was stricken.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGFRi_ueq-M&feature=player_embedded]I measured my recovery by my ability to compute.  I read no emails for three days and took another to write short replies that said I’d actually reply later.  As of last night I was looking for Super Mario Brothers emulators.  I watched three grainy clips of Michael Phelps, looked for more, and then it dawned on me.  I was better.

I’d like to see an online diagnosis tool that determines your level of illness based on the type of computing you can tolerate.  I’d also like to see a full size sculpture of that flight attendant bent at the waist, nose leading the way, made entirely out of feta.

Apparently, nobody sculpts in feta.