Down with the Sickness

I’m sick. As I told my mother in an e-mail, I’ve got the “back-to-school-and-living-on-a-floor-with-55-girls” bug that caused me to sleep my weekend away. It’s nothing abnormal, just my usual runny nose, sneezing, very blurred vision, fatigue, dizziness, headaches and clogged ears that over-the-counter drugs don’t help much. This is nothing compared to the fact that my friend Hannah managed to either dislocate, seriously sprain, or break her ankle during a rugby scrimmage. Ouch.

Friday, I was interviewed for a job at the Homework Hotline, a service where kiddos all over the state of Indiana can call in with math and science questions and get help. So I’m essentially a tutor. This will fill my Sunday and Monday nights from now until… whenever. The second part of my orientation is tonight, and I just hope I don’t put my icky sickness germs on the phone or sneeze while trying to help some kid with their physics homework. Is that tale about not running a fever meaning you aren’t contagious true? I dunno.

In addition to the job (yay!) and the sickness (grr), I also have the new experience of attending a school football game. Much like that anonymous, poetry-writing person that I don’t know and didn’t go to school with, I found the experience enlightening and generally fun, despite the killer sun and the beginnings of my sickness conspiring to make me even more dizzy than I usually am near sets of stairs. I only stayed for the first half, although by this point, the enemy opposing team was catching up (University of the South, if memory serves).

Just because I know everyone wants to be me, imagine this: you’re walking down a sidewalk heading from class to the comfort of your residence hall, head raised just enough to keep the sinus problems from becoming too apparent, and lowered almost enough to minimize the blinding effect of the entirely-too-damned-bright sun, and who should you run almost smack into in your disheveled, icky, tired, and distracted state? You guessed it. A cute guy. In fact, a very particular cute guy. After bombing a math test (and the first thus far, at that), and practically sleeping through physics (in the front row of the classroom), and having my Logic Design teacher run in verbal circles around me again, I wanted to crawl under a rock and die. Actually, given that I found a beautiful (note the sarcasm) spider in my bed this morning (after I had crawled out), I don’t think I want to be under any rocks. Who knows what one may find?

I went to see the Matchstick Men this weekend. That would be the Nicolas Cage movie. I still don’t see how the title fits the movie. The theater was nearly empty (are there enough people in Terre Haute not partying on a Friday night to fill a theater?), but nearly everyone seemed to think the movie was very funny. I didn’t, really. I certainly liked the movie, and thought the little kid was great, and the the directing was great, and the plot was hella great. Cage played the part and the disease (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, or OCD) well, but I didn’t find the OCD symptoms funny. Of course, I’m the same girl who squirmed and wanted to cry while reading that book in the Ender’s Game series in which the royalty of a particular planet were strongly inflicted with OCD. I just can’t find that funny or entertaining. Maybe I’m overly sensitive, but I wouldn’t laugh at a hemophiliac bleeding to death from a relatively small cut, either. The movie was good, however, and worth at least one viewing.

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I now must go finish my homework before work. I would do the Happy Dance about getting a job, but my sinuses would retaliate viciously, I’m sure.