Fever Dream

I have a fever, my eyes are made out of hot grits, and my joints feel like they have recently been melted and been rendered unbendable inside their sockets by a thousand bite-mooded fire ants wielding acetylene torches. My head is a giant pocket that used to be full of lively brain cells, but is now full of boiling mucus. I blame Dan.

Since the miracle is that I am posting at all, to ask for the post to be cohesive and useful to your efforts seems just really VERY demanding of you, and maybe instead you should go make me soup? THANKS. In lieu of cohesive and useful, I offer you the feverish musings of a person who is too feverish and mused out to connect any of the following explanations and advisements to any of the others. Get what you can out of this and then flee before you catch whatever fresh and viral hell I have.

Fantasy pants is actually a term coined by my work-at-home artist brother, Bobby. They are drawstring or elastic waisted pants with voluminous legs that are astonishingly unattractive and equally astonishingly comfortable. People who work from home get to wear them to work in, and it is like a beautiful fantasy. Some people, like Lydia, wear them out of the house to bicycle races, but I do not advise this. My personal fantasy pants have big splashy Indian prints are riddled with moth holes. I love them. They are homey and welcomey, but they are a trap.

Once the Fantasy Pants are on, the day is effectively over for anything that is not cerebral; this kind of clothing says, “Now it is time to make the body so comfy you forget you live here so the brain can play and do.” Put them on if you want to work on a novel, read a great book and mack on the dog, help your child with math, or sit in your closet sorting through your memento box. I find that if I get up and put on LYCRA YOGA PANTS and a jog bra, I am much more likely to go work out. Also, the fantasy pants are so roomy you think to yourself, “I should have more cookies. Plenty of room for cookies in these pants.” Never mind that there is plenty of room for a LIVE CAMEL in the pants, it seems to make sense at the time.

Another random piece of advice? You should very seldom buy things you see on informercials. Even when they look really super, they are probably too specialized and weird for you to use for long. See: The Perfect Push Up machines I bought from the As Seen On Television aisle (which really exists) in Target. They claim to make push ups more effective, and they did exactly that for about a week. Then something shiny happened and I forgot they existed, and now they have escaped into some slag-filled hidey hole secreted in my house. If I had set thirty dollars on fire, that would not have made push ups more effective so much, either, but I don’t see how the end result is much different.