Best Excuse for Missing Work

My best friend swears to me that the best excuse for missing work (or for that matter anything really) is a single word: diarrhea.

I can’t say I totally disagree. For one thing, we’ve all been there at one time or another – it happens. This makes diarrhea forgivable. You just can’t be mad at someone for getting the shits. In fact, you usually feel sorry for them. Diarrhea earns instant sympathy even from coworkers who are going to have to pick up your slack for a day.

Whether it be from food poisoning or some other kind of malady, diarrhea precludes any kind of activity that pulls us away from the toilet for more than a couple of minutes. It’s not something that can be bent to suit circumstances.

Everyone knows this, and that’s what makes it a good excuse. Of course, you don’t want to use too many excuses too often (and to his credit, my friend has never used the diarrhea excuse with me), but this one isn’t such a bad lie. And it’s easier than remembering which family members’ funerals you’ve had to suddenly attend in recent memory. If you’ve run out of grandmothers, diarrhea may be for you.

Author Most Likely to Make You Reach for a Dictionary

David Foster Wallace

I have no good excuse for initially purchasing Infinite Jest. I had never read Wallace before. The cover art was not especially attractive. The book was about the size and shape of two bricks lying side-by-side. Something told me to pick it up, and I’m glad I did.

When I began reading, I found a challenge on every page – all 1024 of them. Some of these challenges took the form of endnotes; some, the complicated timeline; some, the tangled relationships between the hundred or so main characters. Probably the most intimidating challenge was Wallace’s vocabulary. I’m pretty literate, so I’m not used to having to look up three or four words a page. In spite of the labor-intensive reading, I found I really enjoyed the experience of IJ (because an book that massive is definitely something you experience rather than merely read).

Since finishing IJ, I’ve read all of Wallace’s other titles, which include collections of essays and short stories as well as one other novel. I recommend all of them.