The wages of working hard is a head cold.

Over the past few days, I have

• graded discussions and ancillary assignments,
• responded to poems galore,
• attended a curriculum meeting wherein I
• presented several pieces of curriculum, and
• read 70+ job applications, as well as
• made some planning moves for our five year program review, and
• cleaned up my bedroom.

Also, I have been trying to take better care of myself by

• working out.

(Somehow, the bulleted list makes all this well-doing seem more official.)

To resume: also, I 

• drove super, super carefully in the thick-falling snow on my way to
• work.

No wonder I am now

• sick.

So I better go 

• to bed, hopefully to feel better. Maybe I will take some variety of
• OTC medicines.

In conclusion, 

• ugh.

That is all.

Cold, cold, or cold medicine?

After a packed-full teaching and other faculty-work work week, after writing and delivering a paper, after seeing Bright Star, after taking a particularly emotional poem to my writing group and getting what felt to me like a small amount of gratuitous snark, I fell prey to what seems like my by-now-familiar stress-ailment--something very like a cold, with sneezing, a little fever, hot eyes, tendency to fall apart. But yesterday and today, I had no commitments, aside from some online chat appointments with students, so I was able to stay home, and found myself prone to resting. Actually prone. As in, horizontal, for much of both days.

Is it an actual illness? Is it the fact that it's a little bit cold in my house and, for that matter, outside? Or is it the generic cold medicine I took? I don't know for a fact, but the fact is, I slept a lot. And when I wasn't sleeping, I actually did a fair amount of my work lying in bed. Like, I don't know, Proust. Or Milton, or Swift; or Voltaire, Trollope, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Colette, and Winston Churchill.

I'm investigating as of this moment the feasibility of an academic discipline called Bed Studies. You study the cultural significance of beds and bed-related artifacts. In Advanced Bed Studies, you take classes and teach from bed. I am the founder of this discipline, though I give the nod to my forbears. I rest on the featherbeds of giants.

Summer cold.

Whose big idea was the summer cold? It's a terrible concept. Frankly, I just don't get it, how cold germs can be hardy enough to withstand the heat. Plus, the summer cold masquerades as allergies, so there's the whole Claritin-vs.-DayQuil debate, which can lead to lying awake at night deciding if the ticklishness one feels is allergen-related or viral. Then, at 1:45 a.m., the NyQuil makes its most compelling argument, so down it goes. Sleep descends like a hammer. A twenty-four hour hammer.

After my middle of the night drug-taking, I woke up at quarter to eleven this morning. Then, after a period of great grogginess and newspaper reading, I took a nap. A several hour nap. Basically, my whole Sunday I spent behind the water-soluble wall of a LiquiCap, as it dissolved and I gradually woke up. Which puts the likelihood of being able to sleep tonight in a fair amount of doubt. But hey. I haven't sneezed today. Much.

St. Megastore Infirmary.

It's all Advil and DayQuil around here, as the historian is feeling under the weather, my whatever-it-is-I've-got has malingered, and now college daughter came home from work with a migraine.

We are all prone. We are laid out flat by a late winter miasma, or some malevolent creeping malady-monger. Around here, we are are all sicked up.

Pray for us, or send us some soup. There's no one who feels well enough to cook dinner!*

*okay, I did rouse myself from my bed of affliction long enough to go to the store and score some random food. We ate. I just needed to whine a minute.