It's Thursday. That must mean I lived through the last four days. Whoa.
If you had asked me Sunday night whether I expected to live until Thursday, I would have laughed miserably and said no. Or vomited on your shoes.
Sunday night found me in the clutches of a high fever. I went to bed early even though Monday was President's Day and I didn't have work or school to worry about. This worked out pretty well, and I was just starting to feel a little better when Tuesday morning rolled around.
"Golly," I wondered upon awakening (at 3:00 am), "Why is there a fiery serpent in my throat?" I would probably have proceeded to ask the question out loud - to the Russian spy satellites and Big Brother - but I quickly found out that I had almost no voice whatsoever.
You know, when you lose your voice, you get an appreciation for how much you usually talk. Especially if you're me, and your mouth runs marathons for fun, even if there's no one around to listen to you. It was almost spooky how quiet everything was without the golden tones of my jabbering to fill the air. But don't forget, my tonsils were in revolt and it hurt too much to swallow or, you know, breathe so I had more important things on my mind than the spooky silence.
Oh! And I was in SCHOOL, so I had all that to worry about too. I had three big exams I hadn't studied for and two essays I'd barely even thought about writing, and the three-day weekend had done absolutely nothing for my schooling. So I was forced to "improvise."
(Note: "Improvise" is best defined here with an example. Suppose a man has been contracted to knock down a brick wall. He shows up without any tools because, oops, the heavy machinery store was closed by the time he got there and he forgot that his toolbox is at his grandma's house. However, he is determined to finish the job, for he is a man of honor. He decides to "improvise." He takes a few steps back, then runs at the wall and bangs his head into it. Ouch, that hurt. He repeats the process a couple of times. Yeah, this is just going to keep on hurting until it's over. Resigning himself to abject misery and brain damage, he continues to crash his head into the wall until it eventually falls down, berating himself all the while for watching TV when he should have been looking for his toolbox.)
Yeah. So I "improvised" all day long for Tuesday and Wednesday, and all sorts of things went wrong, but even more things miraculously went right. And you know what? I got it all done! Yeah, crazy, I know! I did the research for and wrote a 4-page paper in an hour and twenty minutes, did another paper in about thirty-five minutes, and dragged my way through three hours of vigorous testing. And all of this on a vending machine diet, insufficient sleep, and brain fever. I'd claim superhero-powers, but the truth is that I pray a lot.
And now I find it to be Thursday, and I am dodging no bullets, dangling over no alligator-infested pits, and apparently likely to live for a great many years to come. It's odd, because in the morning every day seems like a giant cactus that's about to fall on my head, and yet by nightfall I am rarely covered in poisonous spines.
College: I'm just always surprised when I've made it through another week.
