I’m up at work right now; I don’t teach Mondays, but I wanted to give my students more time than just the regular class time to turn in their final portfolios. I seem to be regaining my strength at just the right time, because the final portfolio review is always a drainer. It’s not always a happy time for me either, because even though I get immense joy from being able to see just how much my students’ writing skills have improved since the start of the semester, it also marks the end of my association with them. As much as I feel that I’ll always get more enjoyment out of teaching first-year comp than any other English course, I can’t deny that it would kind of be nice if I could teach at least one higher-level course so that I have a longer amount of time to associate with students. (I’ve already had one student this semester ask if she could continue on with me in later English courses.)

Anyway, I seem to have recovered a great deal over the past couple of days, but for the most part I had to write off last week as a total loss. I had to cancel class on Tuesday because there was just no way I could get out of bed, and even though I forced myself to get up here on Thursday to teach, I could barely talk and wound up using the class computer and projector to "say" things to my students. I don’t know how other people react to the bugs that I get, and I can’t really use my family as examples; my father hardly ever comes down with anything, and everyone else in the house already coughs and hacks a lot from smoking. It seems to me, though, that when I do come down with something, and then later in recovery, my sinuses just go completely haywire. The wastebasket in my bedroom is unbelievably heavy right now, and all I have in there are popsicle wrappers and tissues; it must be what’s inside those tissues that is weighing the wastebasket down so heavily. It takes a long time for my sinuses to return to normal, too, and at the rate I’m going right now, I don’t see myself returning to normal until the end of the week, if even then.

In the meantime, I’ve been trying to do what I can to make things easier for myself. I really don’t like being laid up in bed for long periods of time, but it really can’t be helped when I get as sick as I do. I think I’ve watched more television over the past week than I have the whole rest of the year, and believe me, I wasn’t that impressed with most of what I saw. I tried reading, but there’s just something about watching television that distracts me from my illness much more than books or anything like that. This is one of the main reasons I’m hoping I can accelerate my recovery here, because my obligations for the semester are done Wednesday afternoon (that’s when I turn in final grades), and I was really hoping to use this upcoming vacation to do a boatload of reading and writing. (Let’s not forget that I also can’t do my dancey games when I’m like this, and it’s impossible for me to stay on-diet when I’m this sick.) I’ve lost too much time to this bug as it is, and I really don’t want to lose any more.