Green Tea and Crystallized Ginger

Ask my doctor, and she will tell you, that I'm not a good patient. I hate to take any time off from work, I don't like taking prescription drugs, and unless I'm on vacation, rest is something that is difficult to manage, there are just too many things going on, and who has the time? In spite of all my determination to avoid sickness, the world is full of people who carry germs and viruses, and today, I am finally acknowledging the fact that I have the flu. I wanted to spend the morning in my pajamas drinking Nyquil and camping out on the couch, but I had a short business meeting, and a report that was due yesterday, so I spent a few hours working. It's my day off, so working for three hours is not unusual, but I wonder what has happened to the forty hour work week? Is business just more demanding and cut-throat than it used to be, or am I just slowing down?

Anyway, at 1 pm, my meeting was finished, and the overdue report was complete, and I had some time to lay on the couch and just have the flu. Of course, since I am not used to idle time, and I have a full working day tomorrow, (conference call at 8 am, meeting with J. at 10 am, training class at 1 pm, and ops review at 5pm) I figured I'd better work on getting rid of this annoying flu, so that I would be able to function in some productive manner on Thursday, because if I get behind, that means I have to spend most of my next day off on Friday catching up. My constant sneezing and running nose might be okay for the conference call, ( you can put the phone on mute, and nobody will know the difference, I once even got on a call at the beginning when attendance was taken, and went upstairs and crawled into bed and went back to sleep for the rest of it, and no one heard my snoring into the phone), but for my 10 am meeting with J., I had to be mucus-free and alert. So I got out the tea kettle and brewed an enormous pot of green tea. I hate the way that green tea tastes, so I mixed it with pomegranate juice, for an extra boost of anti-oxidants. But my nose was still running like a stuck faucet, so I added some crystalized ginger packets to soothe my over-worked sinuses. My home remedy was the color of a greenish brown slime that you sometimes see floating at the top of an industrial waste site, and it tasted foul. I valiantly drank it down, because who wants to meet with a person whose nose runs uncontrollably? The pile of tissues grew on the coffee table until they nearly obstructed my vision of the CNN business report, where companies with healthy workers were out meeting quarterly sales figures and pursuing a greater share of the market. My watery eyes could still see the stock of my competitors rise, and the green tea concoction could not stop the running of my nose, or the march of capitalism and the need to get more profits. You can always take Nyquil for a cold, but what can you take to cure yourself of the need to succeed? At what point is it acceptable for a company to declare that it has enough? When will we, as a society, take a day off of work and nurse the illness of greed? When will we define success as smaller, sounder companies, and not enormous conglomerates that consume everything in sight?

My green tea and crystalized ginger may make me feel better today, but tomorrow I go back to the world of Wall Street. When will we find a cure for the need to be larger and faster and more powerful than the others?

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