Bloggus interruptus

Two months. This usually, um, doesn't happen to me...

I don't really have any good excuse for not speaking to you, notional second-person pronoun addressee of this blog, more frequently. When we last talked, we were in the springtimes of our youth; now we are brittle with eld.

Or, at least, I am. I'm sicker'n'a southern stereotype involving an elderly dog. I spent a delightful weekend dehydrated and somewhat delirious; high points included shaking so hard with cold that I could get out of bed to put on an nth layer of socks. On Monday, the sad-eyed Turkish physician told me that I had a severe throat infection, but that this would be entirely cleared up by Thursday, allowing me to teach.

I'll let you, second-person addressee, in on a little secret: I like teaching, and--because of that, and because it is my job to do so--I hate canceling classes. I once taught in Chicago with about a million-degree fever, and I like to think my students barely noticed, outside of the occasional moment when I would run out into the hallway and have a coughing fit suggesting I was birthing a goat orally. I would then return demurely inside to lecture on Greek lyric. (I'm sure that there is a Greek account of language  originating in a man orally birthing a goat out of his mouth--don't ask how it got there in the first place--so no doubt I was adding ever-more value to my students' educations, even if what they probably remember is a living corpse telling them incorrect things about ephebes.)

But the living corpse was not trotted out for the students this week. I don't actually have a voice at the moment, and my throat--although better--is still sort of a river of pain. It is Thursday, and the illness still has the run of the temple (e.g. ruined, clammy, possibly used for "ritual activities") that is my body. If I put my head basically on top of my new humidifier, I will cease coughing. If I decide that I don't want to perch directly in front of the spume hose--for so I have named it--I resume with the oral goat-birth. It is a living.

(This humidifier, too, is a Thing. Although all of the interior materials show happy babies gurgling appreciatively, the thing itself has what look like underlights--those things you put on your 'roided-up Civic in 4 Fast 6 Furious--and suggests that it might be able to support Lazer 'Floyd. Updates to follow.)

I am anguished--this is not too strong a word--that I have had to cancel this many classes, as well as a screening of Macbeth. But I have received many lovely messages from my students--no, that is not cynicism--so I suspect we'll all live without the megawatt illumination that is my teaching.

Anyway, regular blogging to resume--maybe tomorrow? I have many things to talk about: Marxist bombings, Ottoman soap operas (read: filmed catfights), and cab drivers subtly implying that my students are whores. But, before that, I am to the spume hose.