Monday, February 17, 2014

Oh, man, ugh

So, I arrived on campus this morning like usual.

Within fifteen minutes, my throat is terribly scratchy (After waking up feeling fairly normal, or what is normal for allergy season, which, yes, has begun here).

I hope this isn't a cold starting but I suspect it is. (There's also some really horrid respiratory....thing.....going around here, where people lose their voices for like a week.)

At least it's making me not worry about my possibly-dodgy tooth (which has bothered me less in the past couple days, and I am beginning to wonder if what I was feeling was an inflamed gum from hitting it wrong with floss or from scraping it with the toothbrush).

And I have soup at home ("Red bliss potato and garlic" - it's one of those Imagine Foods (or Pacific Foods, I forget which) brick-packs of reduced-sodium soup, and it's actually pretty good) so that can be dinner, maybe along with a couple cups of raspberry zinger tea. Oh, and I have Target frozen creme-brulees, I could try one of those out. (I'm sure frozen creme brulee isn't that great, but I figured it was worth a try; I keep saying to myself, "I should make myself some baked custard" because I really like baked custard and it's actually one of the more nutritious desserts you can eat, but I never get around to it)

(It could be worse, I suppose. Norovirus is making the rounds here; a restaurant in Sherman has closed temporarily because so many of its workers got it, and now there's a minor scandal because some of the patrons got sick. I would say, if you go to work sick and you work in a restaurant, shame on you. But if you didn't know you were sick yet - and you can often be contagious before symptoms really start - I don't think any blame can be levied; it's just one of those bad luck things. I will say I ate lunch at home Saturday before quickly running to Sherman to go to the bookstore and the Target. I might otherwise have gone to the Panera Bread but (a) I was concerned about eating in Norovirus Country and anyway, (b) that was the height of my worry about my tooth, and I envisioned biting into a crusty piece of bread and feeling a crack.

And yes, knitters make jokes about Norovirus because of Noro yarns, with their weird technicolor color combinations. But it's hard for me to joke about Norovirus, having had it once - I think it was the sickest I've ever been, especially given the short span of time. It was utterly miserable and the kind of thing I'd not wish on my worst enemy)

But I can tell I am slightly grumpy because I don't feel well. I have a pair of feckless students in one of my lab classes - this is the second week in the row they were unprepared to the point where they could not do all of the stuff they needed to do in lab. I just kind of groaned and said I "sometimes" allow a make up day the last lab of the semester (And OF COURSE it's the most involved lab to set up they will need a mulligan on). But I just don't GET it. They skipped class, so I e-mailed out (via BlackBoard) to the entire class a note of what they needed to do to prepare. I guess they don't check their student e-mail. But the thing is - I've more than taken my responsibility on this, they need to take a little. (They are not biology majors. This class is a "cognate" for one or two other majors on campus, including a major that seems to be far more casual about things like due dates and preparation and how long one studies for an exam than we are. It's often a rude awakening when other-major students take this class, but I hold the line because - well, because I expect people in my classes to behave at some minimum adult level, and that includes coming to class often enough to know what you need to do to prepare)

I will say, though, the level of fecklessness (or perhaps gormlessness, or perhaps both) that I have encountered in certain people recently leaves me shaking my head. How do people who behave like that manage to function, to hold down a job, not eat those little silica packets that say DO NOT EAT on them? Is it just that enough people just do "cleanup on aisle five" and fix things for them? (And I admit, I do that more than I probably should. But sometimes I prefer to put myself out and have things around me generally running smoothly than have someone else's inability to manage their own life derail everything around them - as much as they probably need to experience the consequences of such)

(Or maybe that should be Fecklessness, Gracelessness, Aimlessness, and Pointlessness, to call a few cows into the mix....)

And that's also why I get so ANGRY - irrationally angry - at what I see as nannying or people trying to tell me how to lead my life or even those dumb "health" stories on the dumb news: I work really hard at being responsible and taking charge of my own life, and I resent being treated like I'm one of the gormless ones.


I'm also slightly grumpy because it's one of those "Lots of people got the day off and I didn't" days - no mail, no banks open, and no trash delivery, and I only remembered that AFTER I had already taken the can down to the street, so I had to go back out and haul it back up. And now remember to put it back out before Wednesday morning. They don't like us to leave the rollcarts out - and I don't like to leave mine out because it tends to tip over - so I put it down every Sunday (or Tuesday) night and take it back up as soon as I get home from work the day the trash is picked up.

2 comments:

Diann Lippman said...

We can be miserable together. I didn't get the day off either, and I work for a bank! And there was no place to eat lunch in downtown San Francisco because it was a federal holiday (and there were lots of people working)...

L.L. said...

How do the feckless get by in life? They have charisma and get their groupies to do their work for them.

We've shifted from a culture that prizes character to one that worships personality. Not a good shift.