On the first day of Christmas break, I got really sick for an extremely short amount of time. My wife and I had been driving all day to trade gifts with friends, then to her parents' house, where we were going to spend the first of two Christmases. After doing some last minute shopping, I got a really bad chill while walking through her parents' garage. I hurried inside and bundled up in a blanket, but it didn’t get any better. Eventually I collected a hefty pile of four or five blankets and that started to help. I had been feeling perfectly fine an hour before, and now I had a fever of 102°F.
It wasn’t how I wanted to spend my Christmas and, thankfully, by the next day I was mostly back to normal. The fever was gone in less than 24 hours. But, the sudden onset of such severe symptoms struck me as deeply strange. In fact, it felt more like how things work in video games than how I usually get sick in real-life.
Specifically, it reminded me of how things work inStardew Valley. In ConcernedApe’s modern classic, your jack-of-all-trades farmer can spend all their days in the mines if they want to, looking for loot and fighting monsters. But, if you stay past a certain time, your farmer will collapse and wake up at home the next morning with a note in the mailbox explaining that a concerned neighbor found you and brought you home. The idea is that, if you work too hard for too long, your body will take matters into its own hands and just shut down — even if you’re surrounded by dangerous monsters.
Now, I haven’t been doing hard manual labor, like mining for precious ores or fighting angry crabs. But I did spend the last few months of the year burning the midnight oil, working on my work, dumping time into projects outside of work, and trying to cram in as many games as I could before making my GOTY list earlier this month. The thing is, when I get worn out with work, I tend to work slower, which means that I end up staying at my desk longer just to get the same amount done. I kept it up until last Friday when I headed off for a four-day break. My body seems to have taken that four-day break as permission to force me to take the rest I needed.
I didn’t even have a good time, either. Getting sick during vacation sucks as a kid who doesn’t get to miss school, and it sucks as an adult, too. I felt terrible, so I didn’t play any video games or watch any movies or read any books. I just laid in bed at my in-laws house and looked at my phone. I occasionally mustered the energy to watch a longer video, like the interview Steven Spielberg recently did with Bradley Cooper about Maestro. But mostly, I just looked at Twitter and took short, sweaty naps.
It sucked, but it forced me to stop being productive and start recharging. And that’s productive, too, in its own way. And, thankfully, unlike in Stardew Valley, there were no monsters preying on my downfall. Just helpful neighbors carrying me home from the mines.
