7:25 AM, Mar 17, 2008
Kansas City for St. Patrick's Day
I love every event of St. Patrick's Day in this city. I love miserably getting up earlier than I do for work and meeting Geoff for breakfast at Bulldog. I love walking from there to Main and Pershing and seeing all the excited people working to get their floats ready for the parade. I love meeting up with the Sweeney-O'Rourke Clan and helping them get their float set up, I love walking in the parade, seeing the hundreds of thousands of people that crowd together alongside Grand to watch, and like little children enthusiastically return our wishes that they have a happy St. Patrick's Day. I love the indecision of what to do after the parade is over- the world is our oyster -and invariably settling on waiting in giddy lines at various bars in Westport. I love the day bleeding into the night, and enjoying hopping around the bars and restaurants of Kansas City.
I love Kansas City, and I love St. Patrick's Day. That's why I'm immeasurably upset that I'm too sick to enjoy it this year. The cold that I've been denying I have for days, in a desperate effort to be taken seriously, mutated into a stomach bug last night. After much deep breathing that proved to be quite futile, I lost my lunch in two discrete and progressively horrible trips to the bathroom. After I got cleaned up as best as I could I apologized to Jeff for the terrible racket, and tried to go to bed.
Sleep came in fitful, 45-minute segments between 11pm and 8am, during the intervals of which I would spit out any foul-tasting liquid in my mouth, and take the ultimate risk: I would take a gulp or two of the best-tasting water I have ever had, and walk around my room with my arms above my head in an attempt to burp, instead of letting the water coagulate into another trip to the bathroom. By about 2am, I got too cocky and drank too much for one sitting, and promptly lost most of the delicious water I'd been drinking.
Being as dehydrated as I was from having now gotten sick three times, I was weak and dizzy- so much so that falling asleep wasn't easy, and when sleep finally would come, my dreams were always the same: some odd chain of consciousness in which I had to reassemble my perceptions based on the tactile result of initiating them. It was a careful, tedious, restless dream- the kind that for me always goes with trying to pass ill time by sleeping.
So yeah, I feel pretty miserable, and doubly so for missing St. Patrick's Day, for which I have allocated two vacation days.
Josh had this to say:
Oh, man, that sucks. So, K.C. left the parade on the 17th, even though the official Catholic calendar has it on the 15th this year? Apparently, this is the first time it's been a movable feast since 1940, due to the earliness of Holy Week this year. Ah, Catholic calendar minutiae!
11:21 AM, Mar 17, 2008