Here's a Disease

You don't want: Pneumonia.

Among many others you don't want, I agree, this is the least of them. But man, it has wiped me out. I can't stay awake. I can't work. I take a walk to the kitchen and I need a three-hour nap. My whole body buzzes with exhaustion, all the time. Eating? Eating is beyond me.

I'm teaching today -- somehow -- and we're finishing The Clerk's Tale in Chaucer. This is not going quite as I had planned. I don't teach it as it was taught to me (as a religious allegory -- well, my professor taught everything in the Chaucer as a religious allegory). I teach it as a reply to the Wife of Bath's tale, which it seems, obviously, to me to be, and the Clerk as talking, in a sly and sort of supercilious way, about power structures, using power in a destructive way, blah, blah, blah. Unfortunately, about six students in the class have, apparently, been homeschooled and got taught it as a religious allegory, in the most basic fashion -- Griselda is man, Walter is God, blah blah blah, and are annoyed that I am daring to teach it any other way. I'm not sure I have the energy to deal today. Maybe I'll just give in. "Yes! You're utterly right! That's exactly what Chaucer was doing! Go home!"

At least I can go to sleep then.