A new school year always leads to a bundle of new experiences, and this one's no exception so far. Alas, "new" is not a synonym for "pleasant," so let's provide you with a run-down of the current list of novelties:
To begin with, we've had a pleasant technological change: I'm now typing to you from home with a brand-new DSL connection. Yes, WFS finally saw the wisdom in having faculty homes wired into its network, so I'm now able to access the internet without going through my phone line. A happy side effect of this change is that now I'll be much easier to reach by phone; with all four of us now busily working and playing online, our phone has barely rung in the last few months, but now that we're no longer tying up the line, we can be bothered by telemarketers at all hours of the day! (Note to self: I've GOT to get on that no-call list...)
That change has led to another pleasant change: we can finally download things. Prior attempts were painstakingly slow--a three-minute pop song took at least fifteen minutes to load. For example, I'm now going to download "Maureen" by Fountains of Wayne, which runs 3:16. Click... 26 seconds. Needless to say, this ease of access has been, uh, slightly disorienting. I feel somewhat like the wife of my late friend Si must have felt after she arrived in Chapel Hill, having grown up in Cold War-era Poland; she used to just stand in the cereal aisle at the grocery store, half-paralyzed and half-awed by the sheer possibilities the free market had created for introducing sugar into the human gut.
Similarly, our Napster subscription has me running down row upon row of possibilities, filling my cart with crunchy granola (Arlo Guthrie's "I'm Changing My Name to Chrysler"), classic sugary recipes (Head East's "Never Been Any Reason"), peculiar marshmallowy confections (Jem's "They"), long-though-lost obscure local brands (Glass Moon's "Killer at 25"), childhood favorites (Sweet's "Ballroom Blitz"), and flavor combinations I likely wouldn't have tried if I'd had to buy an entire CD (Cake covering Dolly Parton's "Jolene"). I'm thrilled to have all this bounty in my pantry, no question, but it's going to take a lot of Saturday-morning cartoon viewing to eat it all.
Unfortunately, not all my new experiences have been so enjoyable; heck, they haven't even qualified as benign. Several days after starting school, Ian developed strep throat, and about a week later, Dixon missed a couple of days with a sore throat that wasn't strep. Thus, last Friday night, when I felt some pain in my own throat, I realized that some new-school crud had been passed along to me. Luckily, I was far enough ahead in my own school preparations--no small achievement for Mr. Procrastination here--that I could afford to spend Saturday resting up and popping painkillers. On Sunday, Woodberry's new students arrived, and I was there in my coat and tie and nametag, gamely greeting the new boys and their parents. My throat didn't feel too good, but I was able to get through the early-afternoon meetings before staggering home to hit the bottle (ibuprofen) again.
Unfortunately, when Monday arrived, it was clear I wasn't improving; I was even starting to sniffle a bit. Thus, I headed off to the doctor's office. My usual physician didn't have an opening, so I saw one of his partners instead; I didn't have a fever, and a quick examination of my throat told him it wasn't strep, so he told me to just keep the virus at bay with painkillers and psuedoephedrine, and to report back in a few days if there was no improvement. I dutifully kept up my drug regimen, and my throat did feel a bit better, but my voice was practically shot, and my sniffles were getting stronger. That night, I resorted to an antihistamine to a) relieve some of the snottiness, and b) help me get to sleep. I got through Tuesday--my initial meetings with my two speech classes--and even took a short hike with my Rapidan outdoor program students, but on Tuesday night, the combination of sore throat, stuffy nose, and increasingly fluid-filled head just wouldn't let me lie down with any degree of comfort. Worse, I was producing horrible walrus-like sounds (or so I'm told) that wouldn't let KELLY sleep, so after about 45 minutes in bed, I gave up, came downstairs, and tried to get some work done until I was able to fall asleep. After four hours, it became clear that I wasn't going to sleep, and I wasn't going to be able to work on Wednesday, either.
I made it to the bed at about six, sniffling, exhausted, groggy from another antihistamine, and now uncaring about whether Kelly could sleep or not. She repaid this disdain with charity, calling my department chairman to let him know I wouldn't be able to work, then attempting to pass along to him my half-asleep, drug-addled instructions for the two English classes that were meeting that day for the first time. I collapsed completely after that.
Thursday was my first day of dorm duty, and I did my duty: I snuffled my way through all four classes, belayed Rapidan students at the indoor climbing wall, and maintained a stern disciplinarian's presence throughout study hall and the ensuing pep rally before I staggered home. By that time, though, my symptoms had grown worse, and a new development had appeared: my right eustachian tube was clogged. I could still hear out of my right ear, but only dully--high frequencies were absent, and I was starting to feel occasional jolts of pain in my ear and behind my eye.
In short, it was clearly time to return to the doctor's office, which I did on Friday morning at the first available appointment. I was now running a slight temperature--a first. It took the doctor (still another one of the partners) a few moments to make his diagnosis because a bit of wax was obscuring his view of my eardrum, but once he'd cleared that out of the way, it took him all of two seconds to say "Whoa" and inform me that I was nursing an ear infection.
Unless I had one as an infant, this is the first time I've ever had an ear infection. It's in my sinuses, too, and I might have had that before, but it's not something I recall. Perhaps because I have a large head (I take a 7 1/2 hat), the cavities in it have historically had little trouble keeping the bad stuff flowing outward, but in this case, the bad stuff was clinging for dear life. I went straight to the pharmacy for antibiotics (and new supplies of ibuprofen and psuedoephedrine), stayed home through Saturday's classes, and am generally feeling a good bit better, though my voice still sounds awful and my ear still feels full of goo. But at least now I can appreciate the misery that regular sufferers of these infections have to go through.
With any luck, tomorrow's new experience--the year's first Monday classes--will go smoothly for me. I'll be able to talk, and hear out of both ears, and I'll have lots and lots of cool tunes to listen to.
Oooo! They've got the soundtrack to
Li'l Abner!
1:28 PM
