Wednesday, August 04, 2004
(9:34 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
I am sick
The summer cold is turning into something of a tradition for me. Last year I missed two, maybe three days of work, sleeping almost the whole time. Today I felt as though I could go home at any point and fall asleep without hesitation, fully dressed, in my shoes even, but duties kept presenting themselves, especially on a day when we were, in the parlance of the workplace, "short-handed."Sometimes being sick makes me more sociable. People can already see me having to drop everything to reach for an emergency tissue, all the while trying to process payments, make appointments, "keep the doctors moving," and answer the phone -- why not let them see a little bit of the real me? And then there are those moments when I feel like it's all over, like I've turned a corner and am no longer sick, and I am all of a sudden celebrating life and talking animatedly to anyone who will listen.
The most frustrating thing is that this seems likely to put my Derrida paper behind schedule again. (I'm sure my more attentive readers are sick of hearing about it. The original plan was to do it during late May and early June, before French began.)
Earlier this evening, I was reading Middlesex during my break between naps, and I got to a part where I felt like someone was about to die -- it's over 500 pages long, so it's not a spoiler to say that someone dies. I thought to myself that I was just not emotionally prepared for it in that moment, so I stopped right where I was and went back to sleep.
I think I need to go back to bed now. I'll note, though, that I hear a woman's voice in my house, probably the same one I heard last night at about midnight, when I had just fallen asleep -- but my first impulse, without so much as seeing her, was to get up, get dressed, and go talk to this woman. I should have known, then, that this was going to befall me -- for as long as I can remember, excessive lust has always preceded illness.
