Yes, that is an overstatement. But it is how I feel after 4-1/2 days in bed coughing up a lung — no mean accomplishment, given that it was a dry cough — and peeing my pants every.damned.time. It is the worst I have ever felt without a fever.

This was me…

But I woke up this morning feeling normal…

::sound of cheering::

and ready to make coffee

::more cheering::

and able to sit at my computer again.

::muted cheering; I have a lot to catch up on::

::mice to catch and so on::

…and this is me today.

I played so many word games and Spider Solitaire and did so many NYT crosswords my eyes bled, but I was thankful to have that non-strenuous, non-taxing amusement. Lying in bed is boring. I slept on-and-off for the first three days; after that I was bored but still too sick to actually get out of bed to do anything. People must have gone stir crazy — or developed a lot of patience — before the age of hand-held electronic devices.

Well, that is more than you cared to know about my week. How was yours?

Last night I gave up on most of my pile of TBR books and will return them to the library. Too many 400 – 500 page books with due dates looming. Before I got sick I had been listening to Behold the Dreamers, a book about a Cameroonian couple and their little boy who have emigrated to New York City, she with a student visa and he with an expired application for asylum. It is early 2008 and he gets a job as a driver for a Lehman Brothers executive — you can see where this is going, right? Lehman collapses, his employer’s wife ODs, he loses his job, and he ends up washing dishes in two restaurants for a pittance, all the while fretting about his potential deportation. It is well-written, and the narrator does an excellent job with all the accents. The man is suitably macho and his wife is suitably subservient — for a time — while also being optimistic and resilient and resourceful. I am about 2/3 of the way through it and will finish it now that I am better. Looking forward to it.

I am returning:

• Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie;
• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee;
• The Murmur of Bees by Sofía Segovia

Are we sensing a theme here? I started all three of these, and they seemed excellent… but I found my capacity for reading about other cultures was saturated at the moment. Then it dawned on me, This must be what it is like for BIPOC all the friggin’ time. Well, duh. If I am saturated after 2/3 of one book…

How I plan to be later today.