Technology & the SickBed-Nest

I’ve been down with a cold, which was mercifully a fairly brief one. Mercifully, I say particularly, because being sick colors my mental and emotional life rather bleakly. The world seems overwhelming, somehow—and even if I have the luxury of not dealing with the world immediately, putting-off-dealing-with-it always feels ominous too.

Dramatic language, when the “worst” that actually happened was having to sit in the office for a couple long hours (at the end of which I liberally Lysoled absolutely everything I had touched!) while the phone didn’t ring and nothing happened. See?—I wasn’t missing anything by being out-of-action for a couple days. But the world always feels darker when I’m unwell.

Mostly I just stayed in bed—full of Zicam and Vitamin C, with a Robert Jordan audiobook (a book I know so well that I can drift in and out and still know what’s happening when I’m “in”) to keep my mind from spinning during awake-spells. I did spend some time on the couch—with a fuzzy blanket and buttered toast and hot tea and a couple episodes of the PBS Masterpiece Theater’s “Miss Austen,” followed by the second-best Pride & Prejudice movie. (“The Keira Knightly version”—as I call it, to distinguish it from “the Colin Firth version”—gets top marks for cinematography, sets & costumes, Dame Judy Dench as Lady Catherine, and a tie for Best Elizabeth. Can’t beat Colin Firth’s Darcy, though, and his BBC version is overall better cast, and truer to the book.) As I texted my mother from my nest in the couch, I was very pleasantly set up… except for the part about feeling shitty.

I was actually having fond memories, though, of the “treats” we were afforded as comforts when we were sick, as kids. My mother was the master of the comforting sick-bed set-up. The nest of pillows and afghans on the brown-plaid couch was an integral part of a sick-day at home, along with things we weren’t usually allowed, like daytime TV (or VHS movies, more often), or 7-Up to soothe an upset tummy. Sometimes we’d even get video-rentals, since our home collection was fairly sparse, but (as evidenced by my use of Robert Jordan now) I’m also a person who really likes to revisit favorites, so I watched “Gone With the Wind” and “The King & I” and “Little Women” (Katharine Hepburn) and “The Parent Trap” (Hayley Mills) a lot of times when I was sick.. All of our movies were tape-recorded from television, so we had to fast-forward through commercials (or in some cases, PBS Pledge-drives) when we watched—but the VCR itself still felt like a technological marvel at that point, so I don’t think it occurred to us to be annoyed.

The fact that we could “capture” something to re-watch was still an exciting premise. Occasionally the paid channels would broadcast a free weekend of programming (filled with ads to convince viewers to purchase the channel), so we had “The Parent Trap” and “Pete’s Dragon” and others I’ve forgotten, from Disney-channel campaign weekends. Again with ads to fast-forward through, but we felt like we’d stolen a march on Disney, recording with our sneaky high-tech toy!

Gosh, it doesn’t seemthat long ago that Netflix came on the scene with its revolutionary idea of renting DVDs through the mail, each one arriving with its postage-free return mailer. You just kept a list of what you wanted to see next, and as soon as they received a returned disc, they mailed out the next one on your list. No more trips to the video store (and no more deadlines or late fees), how cool was that? Of course… at that point I still had a dial-up modem that used my phone line—a physical phone line attached to my physical house!—so that tells you how long ago it really was. In terms of technology, a lifetime ago.

I’m feeling a sudden hankering to see “The King & I” again—and if I had thought of it, I could have watched it at the touch of a few buttons, from my couch on my sick-day. I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever watched it when I wasn’t sick… Well. Watching it well can be a new experience. “Etcetera, etcetera, and so forth!”