My Last Two Weeks, Part 1: the Curse of the Gothic Short Story Room

Two weeks ago, Boyfriend arrived for his much-awaited visit to Taipei. I met Mark at the Taoyuan International Airport, giddy with excitement that the intersection of the set "Days in which Corinne and Mark are in a Relationship" and the set "Days in which Corinne and Mark are on the same Continent" was about to increase from nine elements to twenty-one. We spent our first night in Hsinchu, wandering the streets and drinking mango milk.

The following day, we went into Taipei. I started feeling a little woozy on the way there, but I expected that it was just the heat: it was around 30 degrees (95ish, for the Fahrenheit-preferrers), after all, and extraordinarily humid. Even once in air conditioning, though, I thought I might pass out. Opting to hide my discomfort such that I could still engage in fun things, I found myself eventually at a little bar with Mark and Lom, drinking my share of a pitcher of Taiwan Beer. It was late, and had cooled down. The bar was air-conditioned. It was then that I realized just how very warm I was. And headachey. And coughing. And sore.

The following day brought no improvement to my condition, and Mark returned home--home here having the operative meaning of the scary Gothic-short-story-room in Hsinchu--with a thermometer, which wasted no time in informing me of my alarming temperature. At a whopping 39 degrees (something like 102 Fahrenheit), I was easily exceeding my usual lower-than-average body temperature. Hmmmm, I thought in my sleepy fever-induced haze. I should be fine in a couple hours. 


Shockingly to perhaps no one but me, I was not fine in a couple of hours. Picture this: it's a Sunday night. In about twelve hours, I will start a new SAT class. My students' first impressions of me will likely consist of them having to back away from a very sweaty and very pink person who is coughing about plugging in numbers. I will then collapse into a polo-wearing pile of illness during the chapter on sentence completions, leaving my students to wonder forever whether the Hubble telescope's mirrors were (A) efficient, (B) homogeneous, (C) augmented, (D) imperfect, or (E) enormous. I will be cast onto Princeton Review Shame Island, forever to remain for my failure to impart test-based knowledge.

So I called Tiffany, one of my many bosses. She assured me that she would find substitutes for both of my classes and that I should rest. And drink water. And also rest, and drink lots of water. Mostly resting.

So I did! And then I still wasn't better. Some cycle continued of my optimistically pretending to feel okay, my being thoroughly tired out by the abovementioned effort in pretense, and my taking lots of pills and passing out. A Mandarin-speaking co-worker took me to a doctor who prescribed me lots of pills and also some foul-smelling-and-worse-tasting Chinese medicine, which I promptly threw in the garbage bin. I survived from pill to pill, painfully gulping water to the best of my ability. Poor Mark, who came to Taiwan to have fun and party and do fun things, ended up spending his first five days getting me water and mangoes and medicine, insisting that I take my temperature every twenty minutes ("I like data", he would explain patiently to me when I frowned at this practice), and reading Atlas Shrugged while I napped.

The office couldn't quite figure out what to do with me. Within the space of about 24 hours, they had: given all my classes away and told me to rest up in Hsinchu, decided that I was to move to Kaohsiung to recuperate, concluded that I was instead to stay in Hsinchu at least one more night, determined that Taipei might be the best place for me after all, and reassigned me to some new classes.

So Mark and I, both weary--me with the being sick and him with the nursing the sick--packed up our stuff and moved back into my old room in Zhonghe. Even while quite ill, I could feel how nice it was to be back in Taipei. My room is clean and well-lit. My friends are here. Public transportation is easy and cheap and, well, existent. Yes. It's good to be home.

And now, because it is late and I must work tomorrow, I will leave my dedicated readers with an unsatisfying middle to a similarly unsatisfying story.

Sorry 'bout that.

To be continued?