The Plague

Normally I reserve Wednesday posts for discussions of all things Zombie. This week, despite the title of this entry, I will not be speaking of zombies, unless you count the fact that I have felt like one.

One of the wicked cool things about WordPress, which is what I use to do this blog, is that you can post entries in advance. When I’m in my rhythm, I run about 3 entries ahead, so that on Monday I’m writing Thursday’s post while you are reading the post I wrote on Friday. Now, this isn’t always true, sometimes I just can’t think up or find stuff to write about, other days I’ll sit down and crank out a week’s worth of entries. The best part about this is that it allows (forces) me to think about what I’m writing. Often times I’ll write up an entry and then during the next two or three days while it waits in queue, I’ll think up new thoughts on the subject and go edit my entry. The bad part about this is that if I’m away from the PC for a few days and I’ve accidentally “published” items I wasn’t really finished with, they make it to the front page while I’m not paying attention.

So, a little over two weeks ago, I started feeling a tad under the weather. I wrote up a post for the 5th and one for the 7th, and then I vanished into a cloud of illness and phlegm.

There is nothing so oppressive as not being able to breath. There were days that I felt like someone was stepping on my chest. Of course, that didn’t stop me from trying to go see some free movie screenings. However, not being able to take a full breath and hearing a disturbing rattle in my lungs if I exhaled too deeply was just bad… when I realized that the never-ending pounding in my skull was actually from lack of caffeine, I felt like a complete idiot. Thankfully, the fine folks at Papa Johns will deliver Cokes along with pizza. Also, NyQuil works much better if you get the kind with the alcohol still in it. Its hard to feel sick when you are asleep.

However, illness does have its upsides. We did watch all of season three of 24. Now I’m only three seasons behind. I also played a lot of Dead Rising (hey, look! zombie games!) working my way toward the Zombie Genocider achievement (you have to kill 53,594 zombies, enough to equal the stated population of the town).

There comes a point, though, when you’ve missed all the work you can miss and slept all the sleep you can sleep and driven over all the zombies you can drive over… okay, driving over zombies never gets tiring, but there comes a point where you get sick and tired of being sick and tired. My point is at about 10 days.

Sometimes, a person just needs a break. I got sick, and I let myself be sick because I needed to be sick. Ten days of sick and I was ready to rejoin the world. I’m all better now, and I’m more certain than ever before that attitude and outlook affect your physical state.

What was the point of all this? Oh, likely just so that later I can justify to myself why I failed to reach 50,000 words for the NaNoWriMo by pointing and saying “I was sick!” But then again, I do still have ten days… 5,000 words a day. Maybe…

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