This semester has thus far not gone according to plan. We’re on the cusp of what is technically the fourth week of classes, and I’ve been in the classroom precisely twice: once on Wednesday, September 2, for the first day introduction and syllabus discussion, and once on Monday, September 7, for an actual teaching day. I had a meeting in New York starting on Thursday of that week, and so had already cancelled classes for Wednesday the 9th, building that absence into my class schedules.

What I hadn’t counted on was developing a cough about 30 seconds after I finished teaching on the 2nd, as noted in my last post. This cough started as what I assumed was irritation from all the smoke in the air from the Station Fire to our west, and then turned into the dry tickle-in-your-throat cough produced by post-nasal drip. Which is what it still was on the 9th, as I headed for New York.

By the time I got to New York, though, the cough had begun to turn — no longer dry but wet and awful, a racking, nasty cough accompanied by an octave-plus drop in my voice which left me sounding like a long-term pack-a-day smoker. I assumed that the cough had turned into a bronchial infection, and when I continued getting worse on Friday, I called my doctor back home and wheedled my way into an appointment on Tuesday afternoon.

Saturday, though, as I made my way through the subway, Penn Station, the NJ Transit train, the AirTrain, the Newark airport, the Houston airport, and so on, it started to become clear that Something was Wrong. My voice was almost shot, my cough was getting worse and worse, and I was exhausted, easily winded when walking, and just generally felt like crap. I got home that night, expecting to spend all day Sunday in bed assessing whether or not I could teach on Monday.

Sunday morning I woke up with all of the same symptoms as Saturday, plus the addition of horrible abdominal cramps, cramps which started just under my ribcage and twisted down through my muscles and organs without — well, without producing any of the expected resolutions involved in abdominal cramps. It was at this point that I started thinking, okay, what if this bronchial infection has turned into pneumonia, and what if it’s spreading into some more systemic infection?

I live alone right now. And so I had to get myself to the urgent care place while I knew that I was in reasonable shape to drive myself there, and to drive myself back. So I set about the process of getting permission to go to the urgent care place: I called my doctor’s office and left a message with the answering service, who paged the on-call doctor, who called me and said yes, she was worried that this was turning into pneumonia, too, and that I should go to the ER or to urgent care.

Nothing is simple, of course: the medical group that I’m assigned to under my HMO is in a dispute with the nearest hospital, which is now refusing to provide service to us based on the HMO’s refusal to pay a sufficient percentage of what it owes them. And I’ve never been to the next-nearest hospital — honestly don’t even know where it is, and didn’t feel like this was the moment to try to find out. So I ruled out the ER and started trying to figure out if a nearby urgent care place accepts my insurance; happily, they did, so I was on the way.

On one level, it turned out to be a good choice: Sunday around noon, the only patients in there were me, one guy with a lower-leg injury, and one guy trying to get a vaccination of some sort. So they took me right back, were able to do a chest x-ray then and there, did a pretty thorough examination, and wound up both giving me a prescription for antibiotics and high-end cough syrup and swabbing me for H1N1.

Here’s the downside, though; as of this morning, nearly a full week later, I still didn’t know the outcome of that test. The lab picked the test up on Monday, and I was told I’d have the results by Thursday, but I’d called every day since then to no avail. One key difference between “urgent” and “emergent” is, I guess, the speed of the lab results.

In the interim, though, I basically operated under the assumption that this was in fact H1N1. The antibiotics helped some of my symptoms very quickly, but not all of them, by any means. And the more I saw about H1N1’s onset — dry cough, followed by a brief period of feeling better, followed by wet cough and a sudden turn into feeling much, much worse — the more familiar it all sounded.

But I just got the results — 11 am, Saturday — and they’re negative. Which means I’m back to assuming that this is bronchitis, probably of a viral kind, since the antibiotics helped but did not entirely clear up the problems. And I think I may have bruised a rib with all the coughing, as one spot on my rib cage has just been killing me since yesterday.

When it might be swine flu, my course of action was clear: stay home and away from everyone until the coughing goes away. But now… it’s not swine flu, and the coughing’s not going away. Is the course of action the same? I was able to manage staying home last week — how, exactly, I’ll discuss in the next post — but I’m not sure I can do it again.

Just utterly tyrannized by the to do list. Once the grading and the thesis drafts are out of the way, there are classes to prepare for, a grant proposal to be written, and a 15-minute presentation to be carved out of a 40-page chapter. Plus a journal peer review, a dissertation report, and a tenure review. And then there’s that little book project of mine with the looming deadline.

All of which is to say that once some of the small urgent stuff gets out of my way, and I can pay attention to the bigger important stuff, I’ll hope to have thoughts worth writing about, not to mention a moment in which to write them.

1. I am writing my way into new holes far faster than I can do the research and reading necessary to fill them. On the one hand, this is great; I’m clearly making progress on the chapter. And what I need to be doing right now, more than anything else, really is writing, even of the broad strokes, fill in details later variety. On the other hand, I’m trying to do both some writing and some reading each day, and each day’s writing changes my sense of the most pressing thing for me to be reading, so I keep picking up new texts each day.

2. Attempting to keep the details of a complex project straight in one’s head becomes significantly harder when the head in question is so occluded by unspeakable substances as to cause significant degradation in one’s optimal oxygen intake. Which is to say that I have another cold, and I’m seriously annoyed about it. Stupid MLA.

The return from Paris, a little less than a week ago, went fairly well all things considered: all flights on time, all connections made, all bags arrived. Not too bad, all the way around.

We came home, however, to an apartment that needed some serious attention. I won’t go into the details, except to say that it was Bad. And then there was the twelve weeks’ worth of mail, both at home and in the office, and the million errands that needed to be run, in order to get life back on track here. All of it together was positively overwhelming; as R. said, it feels like you have to eat an elephant.

Of course, the only way to eat an elephant? One bite at a time. So that’s where I’ve been since our return to SoCal: taking that bite, chewing it thoroughly, trying not to think about how many bites remain.

I had a positively spectacular work day on Tuesday, one of the first days in years on which I could say that I’d actually managed to accomplish way more than I’d expected. I hoped, of course, that this was the leading edge of a new wave of astonishing productivity, that I’d continue pressing forward at — thinking I was being reasonable — a rate perhaps slightly slower than that, and that I might have a hope of accomplishing at least half of what I set out to do this summer.

And then I woke up on Wednesday with a sore throat, which has today resolved into a fully clogged head. And productivity has all but ground to a standstill. Where I found myself ahead of the schedule by the end of the day Tuesday, I’m now well behind where I’d hoped to be by the end of Wednesday.

There’s not much to be done for it, I guess, except make some more tea, keep the kleenex handy, and try to think of the summer’s schedule as an exercise in non-attachment.

In which I bemoan the absence of posting;
In which I gripe about being so busy;
In which I broadly hint that all the interesting things are unpublishable;
In which I promise a course correction;
In which I suggest great things to come.

Let’s call it done. I’ve got other stuff I need to do.

I’ve been writing up a storm in whatever stolen moments I can get, and working like a fiend at every other hour of the day, with the exceptions of the ones where I sleep (not enough, and not terribly well) and the ones where I watch season 5 of The Wire, which has completely and totally broken my heart this season by being so devastatingly good that I cannot bear the knowledge that I’ve only got one more new episode to watch ever, and In Treatment, which I began watching out of mild formal curiosity (how long can a narrative series that’s on five nights a week hold up?) but have gotten quite caught up in.

Aside from those bits of narrative pleasure, it’s sheer madness: preparing for class, producing endless amounts of administrative paperwork, responding to ridiculous numbers of email messages. And, not least, event planning.

On the one hand, I hate event planning; I don’t like the kind of organization that it requires of me, I don’t like being responsible for a bunch of details that I honestly don’t care about, and I really, really hate having to wrangle people who temperamentally resist wrangling.

On the other hand, this week’s events — Thursday, the English department’s big annual lecture; Friday, a gala celebration for the Media Studies program, its alumni, and its friends; Saturday, a day-long symposium thinking about the shifts and transitions in media production and consumption being produced by the digital — promise to be amazing.

I intend to sleep all day on Sunday, if I can possibly get away with it. I’ll hope to have something new to say thereafter.

I’m off to the eye doctor, foax, which doesn’t bode well for the old productivity today. I’ll be spending part of what remains of the day in a meeting, and the rest of it trying to ignore the increasingly loud ticking of the clock. More later, I hope, when I can see the keyboard again.

Every semester has an emblematic moment. This semester’s finally arrived today, in the moment when, walking along talking with the dean, I stumbled on a bit of uneven sidewalk and completely face-planted on the pavement.

Falling gets harder every year after 30, I think; one has both come to assume one’s verticality to be stable, given, and lost some degree of the flexibility that makes sudden changes negotiable. Actually, I think both states might be summed up in the term “dignity,” and boy, is mine bruised.

I keep reliving the moment, and its aftermath: turning to look in the direction the dean had just pointed, turning back to ask a question, feeling my toe hit the obstruction, and that clear interval in which I knew I was going down, but had not yet hit. And then: lying on my back on the sidewalk, saying “oh, shit” and trying to start breathing again; seeing the dean’s quite evident shock and concern as he asked whether I had hit my head; attempting to reassure the two students who stopped to see if we needed help and offered to call security. Then limping off to the meeting I’d been heading toward.

I’m banged up, though nothing is more bruised than my pride, I think, with the exception of the notebook I was carrying and the sunglasses I was wearing, each of which has a pretty good case of road rash. I don’t want to make too much of this, but it’s awfully hard not to feel like there’s something allegorical in this moment.

Is another three hours in the day, only available for reading and writing. No meetings, no meals, no phone calls, no email. Preferably — and this will no doubt make me sound like even more of a misanthrope than I actually am — no human contact at all. Three hours in which one is somehow protected from everything else, closed into one’s monastery cell (though a comfy cell, with a good reading chair) with only books and the writing apparatus of one’s choice.

Of course, if I’m being honest, what I really need is the focus to be able to use such a magically protected three hours wisely. Off to go make the best of the 28 minutes I do have…