I am a lousy sick person.
I don’t ‘soldier on’ or ‘buck up’ or ‘git er done’ or any of that when I’m sick. Nope, I drag my sorry carcass home, try to sleep, sleep some more, and then, mm, sleep.
A little bit of reading, online and off, but no writing, no blogging, no trying to get in front of my class prep, no errands, no exercise.
Sleep, cough, sleep.
Of course, Jasper-the-vampire’s nocturnal rampages do add a bit of a variety, but not of the helpful sort.
(Okay, so, yeah, I watched some ‘Buffy’ on Hulu. Sue me.)
(And when the hell are they going to get more seasons?!)
Anyway. There’s the weekend.
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Reading a story in the NYTimes on Green-Wood cemetery and wondering, once again, about my [lack of] plans for the forever-future.
No, I wasn’t that sick.
Still, the thought recurs: Where to rest my bones? Along with, Who will do to the digging/burning/tossing into the sea?
For better and for worse, New York is now my city, but I don’t know that I want to be buried here.
Bills and money and work and dating and life and writing and I’ll spend my time worrying over my funeral.
Sounds about right.
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Is there anything I could have said about the Sotomayor hearings that hasn’t already been said?
Didn’t think so.
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The virus that ran rampant through my body got in the way of my responding to a post at The Pursuit of Harpyness on the response to the death of a 69 yo woman who had given birth to twins 3 years earlier.
. . . And I was going to discuss it in brief, here, but then it got all out of control and so I made it a different post. Which may or may not get posted.
That’s how it is.
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This American Life is airing a story about bedbugs, and just finished a piece on cockroaches crawling into peoples’ ears.
Good lord.
Makes me want to puncture my eardrums.
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This course I’m teaching is kicking my ass.
I’ve taught a version of it—bioethics—to undergraduates before, but it didn’t go well, so I completely revamped it. Out with a general discussion of genetics and stem cells and biotechnology, and in with concentration on human embryonic stem cells and assisted reproductive technologies.
(An aside: I’m using Liza Mundy’s Everything Conceivable to survey the ART field. Recommended.)
So far, so good, but man, shit has changed since I last taught it. This is the bummer about teaching about tech: Unlike, say, the ideas of Plato or Machiavelli, technologies do change, and are changed by the societies into which they’re introduced.
In other words, I can’t coast.
I hate that.
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Re-entering the world of biotech and bioethics has caused me, once again, to question whether I should have stuck with it.
I know, I can only make decisions based on the information I have at the time, so retrospective decision-making is pointless, but.
But when one is dissatisfied with one’s current life, and one’s previous life had its pleasures, it’s tough not to wonder why I ditched that previous life.
Again, I know: how easy to forget the dissatisfactions of that previous life.
Still, I’ve spent my life jumping, and landing always with an eye toward the next jump. When I moved to New York, I said, That’s it. This is home.
Only I put a hidden asterisk by the declaration: (*If it works).
As if this place, and my life in this place, is supposed to work for me, as opposed to me working for my life.
I am not the first to note that a person carries her troubles with her, so it shouldn’t surprise me that my dissatisfactions have made their way to Brooklyn.
So now what? I bitch about the something more and the something else and then do nothing more or nothing else.
Can I blame that on the cold virus?
AbsurdBeats 