If it's possible, I liked Valentine's Day even less this year

I'm going to try to write this post even though I haven't so much as read more than a couple blogs in the past three days and still barely feel like commenting. To those who have missed my daily validation that your writing is in fact worthy of the time of some random dickhead in Tennessee, I apologize for my absence.

I got the sickness. Don't know what kind, exactly, but I've had most of the symptoms of the flu. Sure, many of those symptoms are shared by the common cold, but I don't really get colds or when I do, they're very mild. This shit's kicking my ass, or at least kicking it relative to my normal imperviousness to illness and injury. Turns out I'm not unbreakable, I guess.

It's actually been a really interesting experience, though. I suppose I haven't had this kind of progressive illness since childhood, and I've made a point of recognizing the stages as they come and go. It seems like every three or four hours, I'm exhibiting a whole new set of symptoms, with the only common theme being the yellowish-brownish stuff I keep coughing up. Late Monday and throughout Tuesday, I had a persistent, dry cough. No big deal. Late Tuesday, a bit of a headache set in along with some general achiness here and there. Wednesday morning felt bad: headache, sore throat, achy muscles, a touch of dizziness. It would be my first-ever sick day since probably elementary school.

After having some oatmeal and green tea while watching GMA or Today or some other worthless morning TV program, I was feeling so warm that I took my shirt off and laid around in just my pajama pants for a while. Eventually, after noticing that Courtney was still wrapped up in a blanket (she also stayed home), I got up to see what the temperature was in the apartment: 60 degrees! (that's Fahrenheit for you foreigners, and it's really cold for being inside.) My body's temperature was 101.7 (sounds like a radio station). Then later in the day, at about 5:30 (by which time we had warmed the place up to 66), I started feeling really cold and got out my 20-degree down sleeping bag and got in it with a Nalgene bottle full of boiling water. It took me a full hour to stop shivering. That's when I got a little worried, not being accustomed to an inability to regulate my own body temperature.

Thursday morning, my temperature was still over a hundred and my throat was on fire, so I took my second sick day. Strangely, though, around 10:30 or 11:00, the throat soreness disappeared and I started feeling much better. I took my temperature again and it was around 95! What the fuck?! I just interpreted this as rebound, like when you step on a bathroom scale and the dial reels back and forth before settling on your weight. I had just over-shot the goal of 98.6 and would work my way back to it. Whatever the case, I was feeling much better by the afternoon before the nose started its interminable drip, and that just gets annoying. Thank god for Puffs Plus. Those fuckers are as good as advertised.

I'm back at work today, but in the last hour or so I've been feeling extremely weak. Hopefully it's just 3 days of being sick and not eating enough catching up with me and not just another stage of the sickness. We'll see. I'll probably feel better after lunch, during which time I will attempt to read every last sentence of every blog that has so desperately missed my attention. I apologize again for having neglected my duties and also for writing this detailed account of what is probably just an average bout with an average contagion.

P.S. Maybe this should be the subject of another post altogether, but I'm really not sure that Drew Carey was the right choice to replace Bob Barker on The Price is Right. He tends to mumble a lot and his thinly-veiled sarcasm mocking some of the less glamorous prizes may wear thin with advertisers. Yes, a supply of oral spray deserves mocking, but the person writing the checks usually doesn't have a similar sense of humor about those things.