@JayBanzia: You got sick?
@nicopolitan: Yeah. You’re sick?
@TheFoolishHeart: I think everyone got sick.
@JayBanzia: Damn. It’s like a sick party up in here.
@TheFoolishHeart: Sick party at the Red House!*
@nicopolitan: Dude, I went to this party, it was soooo siiiiick.
@JayBanzia: This party is sick.  Everyone’s getting ill.

Sparse participation on the interwebs that began around Wednesday last week can and will be attributed to a recent sickness that overtook my entire household. It wasn’t a bad cold, but just like all sickness it wasn’t entirely pleasant. Having a stuffy head clouds all of my high-capacity brain functions so I was, in effect, some sort of zombie. The infected kind of zombie — not the Romero zombie.

As was the case, no working on music composition (can’t hear very well, even under headphones), no web development (get dizzy when staring at code), no blogging (feeling bad comes across in writing and making comments, you know). And moreover, no watching of the Vancouver Olympics since I don’t subscribe to any kind of TV provider.

So like your average Gen Y male, I resorted to confiding in the one force that was my original babysitter and caretaker: video games. Video games have always been there for me and unlike music, require only eye-hand coordination and not necessarily any high-level mental functioning. And yeah, somewhere along this weekend’s pharmacy run, I did end up buying BioShock 2. I’d squee if it didn’t ignite me into a coughing fit.

But by Saturday I was well enough to be able to rehearse with my newly tricked out Stratocaster! No sickness was going to keep me from taking this one out for a spin. Ok, rehearsal was short in the interest of getting much needed rest, but at least I still got to hear the hard work that went into this guitar a week prior. While the overhauling didn’t come together immediately, after running around the city of LA to fetch a number of parts in different places, and after getting Tek Support‘s … uh, technical support, my guitar sings like a siren and roars like an unholy beast. I can now highly recommend Samarium Cobalt Noiseless pickups with full confidence.

Fun stuff aside, I am easing back into work without a lot of pressure. I’m sweeping up the files from a huge mission critical MySQL Injection (we think… but there are no traces of it) last week. Everything has since been fixed and we are working on sanitizing inputs and I’m making sure all of the files are in the same condition as the restored versions. This paragraph in layman’s terms: easy stuff at work today, thank goodness.

The point of this post: There’s nothing like a little sickness to force your ass into slowing-the-fuck-down. For a long time I fancied myself a workaholic. And while that’s still true, I seem to have rediscovered what defines me outside of work in a real way by doing those things that I love to pass the time, not just telling myself that I am a certain way.

Internet, what slows you down when you’re reeling too fast?

________
*Red House – term used describe the structure, the location, and/or the inhabitants collectively, of a particular house in Los Angeles’s Highland Park. Nico lives here.