I hate being ill.  When I am, my body feels like a foreign country.  A foreign country that’s been taken over by a hostile imperial army.  My head feels like my feet, as if I use it to move myself around from place to place.  I sigh a lot, and linger on bad memories.  I am reduced to feeling like a child, powerless and confused.  And all this just from a low fever and aching muscles and bones.

Obviously, I am ill today.  And complaining from my bed.

I was at a book launch party last night.  My friend Rochelle’s father recently published his own father’s journals that he kept as a young lawyer in Youngstown during the Great Depression.  It is in fact called The Great Depression: A Diary, by Benjamin Roth.  The book has received a lot of attention in places like the New York Times and the Washington Post, etc.  It’s a timely book, and I’m looking forward to reading through the eyes of someone who was alive during that period of our history.  The party was fun:  good food, good wine, good conversations.  I came home and went to bed well-fed and slightly giddy.

Then woke this morning and felt only slightly hesitant to get out of bed.  I tried to sleep a bit more and finally did, and then woke later in the morning so that I could do an interview over the phone with a lovely English journalist who will be podcasting said interview on the BBC on Tuesday, I believe.  It was about the new volume of Interfictions.  I was a bit scattered.  By then,  I was starting to realize that the fogginess was not outside my window but in my head, and that the minor aches that had kept me in bed for an extended sleep were getting worse.  I don’t think it’s the swine flu, as it feels minor compared to the symptoms people have described with that.  I’m drinking lots of fluids and vitamins and eating a bit, though I don’t feel like it.  Mostly, though, I felt like Bridget Jones after that interview.  Silently self-deprecatory.  Let’s hope after editing, an illusion of being coherent will be achieved.  Otherwise, I imagine legions of people in the UK will wonder how I manage to get from point A to point B in my daily life.

Haven’t managed to be able to concentrate on other work now either.  Instead, surfing the internet for entertaining bits and pieces to see me through the day.  If you’ve got anything good to watch/read/listen to while ailing, please send links!  I have a feeling that, unless this is a quiet sort of 24 hour thing, I will be needing them for the next day or two.

Otherwise, a busy week ahead of me.  Illness is also untimely.  There should be federal regulations on this sort of thing.