I've got the malaise

When Jason and I visited Utah a few years ago on vacation, we were surprised to see warning signs saying that we shouldn't approach wildlife because of the potential to catch bubonic plague. Yeah, the one that killed 40% of Europe's population a couple of hundred years ago - that's lurking in the flea population in some of Utah's national parks. There's nothing like a plague warning to make that chipmonk look fearsome when it won't stop begging for food ...

photo credit: http://www.creativeboredom.com/chipmonk.jpg

Anyway, the warning signs listed some of the more prevalent symptoms of the plague, including headache, sore throat, enlarged lymph glands, and malaise. "What the heck is 'malaise?'" we wondered, convinced we probably had it, whatever it was. We started joking around about it, declaring dramatically that we had the malaise, and there probably wasn't any way to prevent it from killing us by dawn - you know, that sort of thing.

We looked it up when we got home, and it turns out that 'malaise' is the perfect shorthand for 'I'm feeling crappy, but I can't tell you why.' It's still in our official family lexicon; for example when Jason comes home from work and I've had a long day of dealing with Liza, I'm apt to tell him that we've both got the malaise, and it's his turn to deal with it.

Only he's not here right now, so I got to deal with my own malaise by myself today. Nothing definably wrong with me, I just felt blech ... so when Liza finally went down for her morning nap, so did I. What started as "I'll just sit her for a few minutes until I'm sure she's asleep" turned into "Well, I'd be warmer if I was under the covers ... but only for a few minutes" which turned into "The FedEx guy is knocking at the door and it's noon and I'm still in my pajamas with bedhead." I'm feeling much better for having had the extra sleep, but I know this is going to screw up my sleep schedule, which is going to make me feel bad tomorrow, which is going to make me want to take a nap, which will just mess things up even more. I'm hoping the schedule messup will be worth it - if I can fight off whatever illness is lurking within me, I won't have to suffer through the whole Easter vacation trip. Then again, maybe I'm just postponing it so I can be good and sick while I'm at my in-laws house ... you just never know. But, you know, I've got the malaise, so I probably won't live until Easter anyway ...