Fever

Whenever I hear the word "fever" I think of the old Peggy Lee song. Or Bieber Fever, lately. Unfortunately, it seems I have a real live fever this weekend, and it officially sucks. It's pretty rare that I don't go out and do some sort of run or hike on a Saturday, but today I was parked with a book next to a heater.

The book, Deepness in the Sky, was sort of lame. It is a sci-fi paperback where this evolving race of spiders outthinks two different human races--some Space Nazis and some Space Peddlers. I can't believe I stuck with this schlock to the end, but it was a Hugo Award Sci-Fi book of the year ten or fifteen years ago, and it started out ok. Since I seem to be wasting the day away, I'll probably watch Machete next. I've heard good things.

I felt my present ill sickness coming on around last Tuesday. Depsite the symptoms--swollen glands, dry mouth--I went ahead and ran nine or so in 30 degree weather. Probably a dumb move. However, I am so ready to start pushing the mileage up. Apparently the body and the weather are not cooperating. Thursday was a tough day in the office, coughing violently and yet trying to tend to necessary matters. Friday was marginally better.

On the subject of pneumonia, I read this really really amazing piece in the New Yorker from about a month ago. Joyce Carol Oates is a well known, prolific writer-- I believe the in-residence writer at Princeton (sort of like Einstein was there for math). She wrote a "Personal History" for the magazine (my favorite, btw), and it was about her husband of forty years. Basically, he didn't feel good one day, and he went to the hospital, and a respiratory infection type complication caused his heart to stop about a week later. When I started reading, I thought it was a fiction, as that's what Oates writes. It was a powerful piece--one of the most memorable articles I've read in the magazine in twenty years.

Not that I have this kind of worry. But, as much as I want to run this weekend, you got to know when to hold them, and know when to fold them. Kenny Rogers said that. So I'm staying home and watching Robert Rodriguez movies and reading bad books.

Maybe I'll sneak around a mountain tomorrow.