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Saturday, June 30, 2012

Under A Blanket

I finished teaching the first of my three summer intensives Thursday (well, there is still grading to do, but the high pressure public lecturing part is done), and my body reacted the way it used to react to the end of each semester back when I was an undergraduate: I woke up the next morning feeling deathly ill, coughing like crazy and lumbering around with muscles that seem to have transformed overnight into bags of cement, probably because I had been shunting off allowing myself to feel whatever bug I had for days while I was busy preparing for finals until I had a break in which to let the pent up havoc to wreak itself. Of course, I'm not really in such a break now -- my second summer intensive is already underway and my third one begins Tuesday, so I don't really have the time to really wallow in illness, but -- silly body! -- it seems I am to spend this long weekend under a blanket watching Sigourney Weaver flicks (weekend illnesses are made for theme-DVD marathons, I find) and drinking hot theraflu whether I really want to or not. Occasionally, I grade somebody's final paper from my to-do pile in moments of comparative lucidity, but otherwise I'm a bit out of commission. I can't promise my usual steady stream of weekend anti-futurology or anti-GOP fulmination, but tomorrow is a new day so we'll see.

1 comment:

jimf said...

> . . .drinking hot theraflu whether I really want to or not. . .

That's the thing about taking supplements, too. They say if you're sick
you should gobble vitamin C every 15 minutes until you reach "bowel
tolerance" and then back off a little. But I can hardly imagine
keeping them down at all if I had the flu. (or cancer!).

Even when I'm **well** (most of the time, so far, but the "warranty"
on this body has certainly expired!), the vitamin pills & stuff
I take make me slightly nauseous.

How Ray Kurzweil takes 250 pills a day and still manages to
retain any appetite for actual **food** seems to me like a miracle!

Maybe **that**'s the criterion for surviving the Singularity --
it's for the folks who can take fistfuls of vitamin pills
every day without barfing on the bus.