Oink.

It looks like I was oinking.

I started having severe muscle aches on Thursday night while I was playing Okami, and I went to bed not long after that. (I stayed up just long enough to turn on the Dodger game so I could listen to it while I tried to go to sleep.) I woke up Friday morning and felt like total crap---easily the worst I've felt in over 3 years, but actually nowhere near as bad as that day that Lemming might remember. That was the one in which I slept 18 hours and bowed out of going to a play with him. That day, I somehow had walked to campus and had to be driven home by the condensed matter physics secretary after she saw me lying prostrate on the floor of my office. Then I slept for most of the next 3/4 of a day, went to campus the next day feeling not too horrible, and had the guy at the Red Door Cafe tell me that I looked horrible. (My response: "You should have seen me yesterday.")

Anyway, having learned my lesson, I cancelled all my meetings on Friday and I stayed home except for a brief walk to get fresh air and coffee + pastry. On the way, I also dropped off a form I absolutely had to submit on Friday, and I tried to avoid everybody as much as I could and just slide the form under the right door. (I probably shouldn't have stepped out of the apartment at all, but being cooped up was driving me nuts, even though I was lying down most of the time and occasionally drifting in and out of sleep.) At first, I couldn't even sit up for 5 minutes without feeling extremely nauseous, but things were already getting better by mid to late afternoon. Then I looked up the symptoms of both flu and swine flu, and it looks like I had just about every one of them. I went to bed at 9pm on Friday (and I was exhausted by that point) and except for getting up briefly a couple of times in the middle of the night, I slept until 9am. I dealt with e-mails on Friday, but that was the only work I could handle. So much for the page proof corrections I was supposed to finish by then. By the way, just to give you an idea of how cushy my job is, one of my colleagues brought me fruit and tea to my flat.

I already felt much better yesterday. In particular, I felt well enough to type up my page proof corrections (that I had finished scribbling on paper on Thursday), but that and some e-mails are about all of the work I did. I again got coffee and otherwise stayed in my flat (aside from a brief venture to the SCR to return the stuff from Friday and take a couple of apples). For the second day in a row, I ate only fruit, nuts, coffee, and pastry (finishing the one I started the day before). I also started a new game of Civ IV, because I think that getting swine flu is the FSM's way of saying that I should be playing Civ IV.

I'm pretty much recovered now, except that I am pretty heavily weakened from this and have eaten very little during the past couple of days. I am going to have to continue taking it easy for several days---I just don't think I'll have the strength to go back to my normal work schedule (which I suppose most people would consider an insane schedule) for a few days. Naturally, I haven't done the work this weekend that I initially intended to do, though perhaps I'll do a small bit of it today. Everything else will be delayed in turn, but my collaborators and I will just have to deal with it. It's better to get this over with and have this happen after classes start when it would be much harder for me to slow my pace this drastically. (It still annoys me to need to do this, but I don't have the strength to go at my normal pace right now. I guess there are a few things that are capable of slowing me down. :) )

I guess I get all of the hip diseases.