After fighting an angry stomach¹ all weekend, I called off work today. My stomach still feels off, and I’m very, very tired. Now I’m afflicted with another issue: sick-time guilt.

A good number of gainfully and honestly employed Americans do not get sick-time. If they are ill enough to miss work, they simply don’t get paid that day. It’s this larger, socialistic awareness that always has me feeling terrible when I call off for a day.

I don’t have this issue with vacation. I view vacation as the workplace rewarding me for getting out of bed every weekday and choosing to go to work. My guilt is somewhat assuaged by the fact that the reward is so mathematically disproportionate.² And plus part of the aim of vacation is to have fun.

Sick-time, though, isn’t about having fun.³ It’s about your body not working the way it’s supposed to work and you therefore can’t work the way you’re supposed to. So even though I feel like crap, I feel like I have to do something with my sick days because otherwise I’d be taking advantage, or at least sticking it in the face of all those who don’t have sick-time.

So I clean the house. I read, as opposed to watching TV. I don’t play video games. I try to do something educational. Basically, if a non-sick-time-possessing person asked me tomorrow what I did with my free day off today, I’d be able to say that I honestly didn’t waste my time.

Which of course means that since I feel impelled to do all this stuff, I’m not doing the one thing I’m supposed to be doing with sick-time, viz, convalescing. So am I really using my sick-time appropriately?⁴

I suppose this is a very typical, white-man, middle-class guilt sort-of thing and I feel lame even feeling it. But it doesn’t come from a place of selfishness. In fact, I wish there were some sort of national or state-level sick-time bank into which I could deposit the vast quantities⁵ of sick-time that I don’t use every year for people who don’t have it. But I can’t. It’s probably for the best I suppose because who knows what might happen down the road. But if I could vote to change it, I would.

As opposed to Ohio Senate Bill 5, which on the surface seeks to abolish collective-bargaining rights amongst public employees – such as yours truly. But there are all kinds of little pieces of bullshit in this bill, the primary concern for me being that they want to limit employees to no more than ten sick-days per annum. I doubt that the amount of sick-leave I take every year adds up to more than ten days, but:

Say, for example, Ashley and I were married. The bylaws of the university would allow me to take sick-time to care for her, if necessary, for as long as I have the sick-time to cover the absence (and as long as I follow the Family Medical Leave Act). As someone caring for a post-double-lung-transplant patient, this is always a possibility. But the state wants to say that I only get ten days, total. To care for me and/or her and/or any kids, if we had them. This is main part of SB5 that really chaps my ass. Gov. Kasich and most of the Republicans in the Ohio legislature seem to think that limiting sick-days will somehow save the state Madoff-quantities of money, which is the point of this whole bill since Ohio can’t even pay the interest on the Federal money we borrowed.

If this passes, I hope Gov. Kasich has to experience the double-bind he’s put public employees in with this law, what with he himself being a public employee. Because the governor is an example of the problem: upper-class Americans pulled all kinds of financial shenanigans and in time the rug was pulled from under them. Banks crashed. Money was lost. And how they’re making middle- and working-class Americans pay for their mistakes. To say nothing of the poor. This is the kind of thing that really makes me sick.