How To Be On Bed Rest

1. Gather all the requisite blankets, pillows, tea, and snacks on the couch, which will now be your home base.

2. Turn on the TV to something innocuous. Think about how the TV is less for watching and more as a white noise companion in your standoff against injury.

3. Arrange the pillows in the perfect sandwich of support, with your weakened body as the meat.

4. Think about your body as meat.

5. Think about how you instinctively chose your body to be meat in a sandwich instead of cheese. Feel good about what that probably says about your self-perception.

6. Put your laptop on your stomach and get on Facebook. Immediately realize that Facebook is unfriendly territory for the sick and injured, it invariably serves to do nothing more than remind you of all the exciting things all of your able-bodied friends will be doing. Feel a little pissed at yourself because if we’re being real here, you probably wouldn’t go anyway.

7. Decide that Facebook isn’t going to be a part of your recovery process anyway.

8. Get up to get your wallet. It should’ve been part of your setup all along. All that nonsense online ain’t gonna buy itself. Your rent ain’t gonna make itself late.

9. Engage with the TV. Bring it out of the white noise recesses and push those buttons. This is how you interact with the TV:

• Start out with something enriching, like a documentary about the Cold War. Eventually (10 minutes, give or take) this will get old.
• Move on to a trash-disguised-as-intellect program like theE! True Hollywood Storyof Kate and Pippa. Prepare an argument about how you’re only watching it because the media’s ability to create and destroy celebrities and the effect it has on the consumptive population is fascinating to you in an anthropological way. This reason is in case your boyfriend walks in and asks why you’re watching that trash. In reality, you are thinking about how Pippa’s ass is really not all that, and how Prince Harry must feel really vindicated about turning out to be the hot one.
• Eventually you will be watching re-runs of Friends because that’s the last stop on every TV train. There’s something remarkably comforting about watching the same known-by-heart episodes as an adult that comforted your sick self as a kid. You need not create further explanations for your boyfriend. If he doesn’t get that, screw him.

10. Listen to the new Florence + the Machine album until you know it really well, until you can claim emotional possession over it, until you can look forward to the moments that draw out your tender little feelings, and get ready for them to ensure they have the maximum amount of impact, like holding off on an orgasm until it’s as big as it can be.

11. Cruise random dewy photos on WeHeartIt.com and judge yourself. Feel above the 17-year-old girls who post/ take/ feel things from photos on there. Simultaneously realize that you kinda still feel something, but it’s a little darker, a little more hollow, a little more stale. It’s not the same as what they feel but it’s enough to make you forgive them, and more than enough to make you envy their youth.

12. Think about how silly it is to feel jealous of youth in your mid-20s.

13. Wonder if, the last two activities considered, you really are anything near as evolved and superior and mature as you’ve always liked to pretend you are.

14. Realize that you stopped claiming that about yourself a while ago. Furthermore, realize that you no longer think it’s important to be ahead of your age-indicated normal in terms of maturity. Remember the comfort you now have with process of growing and learning and the awkward perfection of existing in this weird wasteland between young and grown. You are best friends with your in-progress-ness.

15. Realize that last chain of thoughts just brought you back to smugly thinking you’ve got it all figured out by acknowledging and claiming contentment with not having it all figured out. Throw up your hands and realize that, all in all, you’re probably absolved.

16. Spend an unhealthy amount of time wondering if it’s normal to be so afraid of everything (spiders, storms, slipping and falling and dying, terrorists, debt collectors, exes, etc.) that you don’t leave the house sometimes.

17. Wonder what’s an unhealthy amount of time.

18. Feel homesick for every time you were happy.

19. This is where you start to go to the dark place, and you don’t even attempt to clip the flow. Accept that sometimes you need to really go there, look the bad thoughts in the face and say, “I see you, you dirty minge. I love you. Get out of me.” Decide being stuck on the couch indefinitely is the right time to go all Jersey Shore bar fight on your dark side.

20. Instead, tweet something at one of the Kardashians in an attempt to get them to retweet you. You’ve done this before; it hasn’t worked. Hope that the rest of your Twitter constituency thinks you’re just being ironic. Maybe you are. Mostly you wonder what it would take to get that retweet. You don’t know where that falls on the irony scale because sometime in late 2009, it stopped being okay to discuss, think, or even say the word irony without incurring eye-rolls all around.

21. Feel kinda glad that after positively goddamn everything being ironic for a few years in Hipsterland (oh we also can’t say “hipster” anymore; even the once-progressive notion that “Everyone’s a hipster” is tired and trite now), irony is no longer a valid excuse to do something, nor does it excuse something, nor does it make something interesting. Irony obviously still exists, but it takes more to hold the fickle hipster attention lately. Sincerity is the new black, and you like that.

22. Wonder what the next black is.

23. “Black” looks like “back” and goddamn, your back hurts. Feel the temporary Twitter distraction wearing off and realize you’re still in the dark place. Laugh about the appropriateness that the Kardashians are somehow part of that. It’s not a happy laughter.

24. But seriously, why does stuff like this always happen to you?!?!! And here we go: recount every crappy thing that has ever occurred in your life, allow yourself to spin out in a messy fit of victimization. Think about every failed love, every hangnail, every time you felt you would never reach your full potential, every time someone wronged you/ stole your parking space/ cut you in line/ lied to you/ broke your heart/ carelessly let you break theirs/ did something you were totally going to do but they did it first (seriously, HotorHomeless.com was your idea! Assholes.)/ did any injustice to you. Think about it until the weight of it makes you dizzy and you’ve got yourself half-convinced that you are, like, kinda cursed.

25. Acknowledge that most of your frustration is with yourself. You could do more. You could work out, write, sleep, throw dinner parties, shave your legs, volunteer more. You should’ve accomplished more by now. Your “ingénue” window is getting smaller. Consider that it might’ve closed already.

26. Wonder why, most of the time, your mother doesn’t answer when you call.

27. Jesus Christ, your kitten is so uncomfortably cute when he sleeps.

28. Decide to get over all that darkness, at least for the time. Be honest with yourself that this decision has less to do with really being over it, and more to do with being too lazy or too scared to really get into the heavy stuff, the burning black matter core, where all those other bad little tangents shoot off from. They are the apples. You won’t let yourself even look at the tree. Realize this hesitance might be part of the tree. Stop there.

29. Want to have sex, but realize that’s what got you into this situation in the first place. Declare an embargo on dick. Look forward to the signing of the peace treaty.