Ah-CHOO!

I am a complete and total coward when it comes to illness. This is most likely due to my bizarre and checkered health history. I once caught pnuemonia...in May. I had an emergency appendectomy, including a gift-with-purchase case of peritonitis. Last year was a revolving door of recurrent kidney infections. There was the Summer of Epstein-Barr. Food poisoning. And so on. I am a repository of angry, fussy, uncommon germs.

Sunday evening I found myself with a bit of the sniffles and a feeling of complete exhaustion. I decided this meant I was most likely going to die. Or, at the very least, be carted off to a hospital and experimented upon with red-hot tongs by white-fanged nurses. So I did what any sane person would do: I went to bed. And, boy howdy, did I sleep.

At 7 pm, I crawled into bed. I woke up at 8 the next morning, groggy and woozy and snuffly. I called in sick to work, crawled back into bed, and slept until after 11. I spent the rest of the day cradling glasses of ginger ale and huddled in front of DVDs, a backlog of newspapers, and this month's issue of Elle Decor. I figure the best thing to do when sick is to get better. And getting better means rest, fluids, and the films of Wes Anderson.

Amazingly, the office carried on without me, the world did not spin off its axis, and I am now back at work. Nothing like 16 hours of sleep and a 2-liter bottle of Schweppes to cure what ails you.