“My dear Burge, life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You are always at the crisis; I am always in the convalescent stage. I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.”
– George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah

This morning I’m able to whisper a little. “I’m doing great!” I thought, and then I realized that I was having yet another Hyperbole And A Half moment. I have a lot of those. Like this, which is just about exactly how I looked when I had both the Norwalk virus and an untreated disc herniation. Or this. Or this.

You know, if I were sure it was responsible, I might think this bug has been worth it for the vivid dreams I’ve been having lately. Last night I visited Jessica C. in her magnificent underground mad-science lair complete with two dozen artificially intelligent origami crabs and a player piano that played “Rockin’ Pneumonia” a la Professor Longhair. Good job, subconscious.

I just had a dream about someone who was named either Mincemeat Princeton or Princeton Comma Mincemeat. I’m not quite sure what it was he did, but I’m sure it was fussy. No surprise that I’ve got my paws on the new Pratchett, then.

What gets me is that the only one I remember is actually in 5-7-5 form:

In this floating world
Nothing is ever certain
Save computer bugs.

Thank you, subconscious mind!

Josh and I are wrapping up our STP@home at last. I hope to make it to the finish line within two weeks. Josh is about thirty miles behind me, but he could still catch up if I slack off. The race is doing a pretty good job of building my stamina.

Via Salon’s Broadsheet, this strange introduction to a recipe: “As a Southern belle once said, ‘A man can have sex with any woman, but not a good chocolate cake.’” I am not sure I’d want to argue with that.

And via Mind Hacks, an article about a very seriously mentally ill (but hot! oh so hot!) girl whose successful pharmaceutical treatment caused her to gain weight.

“They had removed a stigma of the mind and replaced it with a stigma of the body. It struck him as strange that the patient had been the only one not to worry about a loss that the team around her found so tragic… The treatment had reversed a Faustian pact in which Nia had been beautiful and mad, and replaced it with another—in which she was fat and sane. But was it really a blessing that Nia seemed to have no conception of what she had lost?”

How it strikes Nia, we’ll never really know. Nia doesn’t have a voice of her own in this article. But it does seem to me that, in her place, I would likely be so relieved at no longer being tormented that worrying over having my features “corrupted” (jeez!) would not be among my immediate priorities. The whole thing had me spitting hot nails. Pandagon has it right: “Can’t we just sedate her and put her in a glass coffin?”

The petting zoo system was broken, so I figured I’d just watch the documentaries. But one of them was so exciting that I lost my head and unthinkingly ordered a polar bear. Which arrived. Thunk! Turns out only the return was broken. I briefly petted the bear’s broad, confused-looking head, and realized that once the ice melted, I could be in big trouble.

I left the room, shutting the door firmly behind me, and ran downstairs to find a guy working on the machinery. “Um, excuse me,” I said. “I’ve just done the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life.” He grumbled a little, in a friendly way, and said he’d deal with it. Apparently the polar bear thing was a known problem. Then he handed me a set of delicate little scrapers and set me to cleaning out some tiny channels that had gotten clogged. When he got back from handling the polar bear situation, I was still working; we hung out for a while, chatting and working on the machinery.