Five things. #thesick

1. I've been sick since the new year. It's been, like, a big heavy gloomy visitor sitting on my head. Picture that, if you will. Here are things I have missed: working out with my daughter. Working out, period. The flow of new year energy into new good habits (or at least that's how I imagine it would have been, had I not been sick). Cooking actual food instead of foraging for edibles. A jazz concert. Movies out. Back to school meetings (you decide if that was a plus or a minus). On the other hand, I have had some really serious naps. Naps galore. It's as if my body basically put its foot down (picture that if you will) and said: listen here you have not had enough sleep for a decade and I am putting my foot down, in a manner of speaking, and you are slowing doing right here and now and take that nap dammit fore I smite thee with a cough! and sick sneezing and all manner of congestion! And lo, it was so.

2. Things we've done while we were sick (of course, in the way of the unjust universe, the historian caught a bit of the sick with me): watched Stranger Things. Watched The OA. And now we're watching Schitt's Creek. I have finished Patti Smith's The M Train and am now reading Tana French, The Trespasser. That's when I'm not falling asleep for a giant nap again.

3. Having watched The OA and thus having been trapped into its weird and compelling story world, there was one whole day when I woke up, feeling I had dreamed The OA  dreams, and my day was thus The OA inflected. This was after we had finished The OA, so I would have had to start watching it over again. Which I might do, honestly.

4. Things that are hard to do when you're this sick: make a plan. Cook. Revise a poem. Write a syllabus. Get out of bed. Call a congressman or senator. Move from room to room without finding a place to lie down. I am not joking, America: this illness has been epic.

5. Today I put on my fox sweater and went to class to teach for the first time. I croaked out the key activities of the course and my enthusiasm for the course and how much I love teaching and so forth. I demonstrated key features of the Canvas site. I memorized their names. Then I went back to my office, fetched my coat and keys, and drove home. And took a three hour nap.