How to be Sick and Hot

I am sick. I caught COVID again last week, at either a very hot Latin Dance establishment in midtown Manhattan or a melancholy Russian tea house (also in midtown Manhattan). Or at a weird Victorian bar with a lot of flowers hanging from the ceiling and a mocktail named after Brandon Flowers (who is, himself, the definition of a mocktail, particularly if you consider all his music after Day & Age). Anyway, not much to report from the frontlines of Hotness, but building off of my experiments in “making staying in Hot”, I have tried my best to make the most of this god-forsaken illness.

How to be sick and Hot:

• Have a fever

• Cover yourself with the thicker blanket as opposed to the thinner one

• Be a little more ambitious than you should be and make enough soup to feed a village

• Eat a lot of soup; observe as the pearls of sweat gather on your brow and roll down your cheek

• Build a six-drawer dresser in the thick haze of a fever

• Order Chinese food, make sure it is slightly too spicy, allow your nostrils to drip profusely

• Ask your friends to tell you jokes and share gossip. Send them a lot of dog pictures

• Window shop a trip to Barcelona

• Make decisions about whether or not French things are actually Hot or just French

• Live in an pre-war NYC apartment with radiators you can't control

• Attempt to sleep propped up by a lot of pillows in the hopes that allows you to breathe through a congested nose. When you realize that doesn't work, lay back down and concentrate, really hard, on one nostril opening up. Once it does, and the air feels too cold on the back of your throat, wince. Remember you have tiger balm in the bathroom. Coat your chest in menthol. Finally sleep. Wake up three hours later with a raging headache.

• Be Madame Bovary

• Take advantage of the blisteringly hot water that comes out of your shower to create a little sauna in your bathroom. Bring your laptop to continue watching silly TV despite the risks of water damage.

• Develop opinions about face jewelry

• And more seriously, allow yourself to rest, really rest

Fevers, Calentura, Israeli Ministers, and Rauw

In Spanish, the word for “fever” is “fiebre”, but it can also be “calentura” if you’re a little old-fashioned. Unfortunately, however, “calentura”, in most of South America, also means… excited. Anyway, during my illness, I learned that apparently, at some point, Golda Meir, former PM of Israel, was sick in bed with a fever, and this news item was translated in Spanish-language media as “Golda Meir, in bed with calentura”. Scandalous.

Only tangentially related, in March of last year, I fell victim to a particularly nasty case of the flu. The source of the flu was a hot new bar on the Upper East Side called Avoca, where a friend and I went to “get a single drink” on a Friday evening, but ended up getting called up to dance with a table of rowdy, visiting Irish ladies. One of these ladies insisted on yelling, “YOU ARE A HOT BITCH” to both me and my friend, multiple times, very close to our faces. It was bizarre. Anyway, the following day, before I was fully, gravely ill, I went to see Rauw Alejandro in concert for the first time. I already had a bit of a crush on him based on this song from Afrodisíaco. However, upon seeing him singing, dancing, in front of me, in real life, I almost died. I have never seen a Hotter man in my life. Honestly, it was a revelation. A realization.

Before learning that the friend who went to Avoca with me on Friday night had also caught the same bug, I was convinced that I was sick because of the concert. The more logical part of my brain ascribed the illness to inhaling gunpowder from them copious fireworks, but, deep down, I suspected I was working through my own case of calentura.

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