Of course you’d never guess from reading my blog, but I am quite sick at the moment.  I am huddled on my bed, with spent tissues all around me, awaiting my next coughing fit.  My back aches from the repeated spasms!  I take shallow breaths so as to avoid inducing another.  My nose tickles constantly, and its efficiency as an air passage is greatly reduced from the normal level.

Today, no fever, to my knowledge: I’d rate the day as more “viscous” than “hot”.  My temperature rose to around 102 degrees Fahrenheit (38.9 degrees Celsius) at one point yesterday, and a little less on Tuesday. I was still mildly productive, working from home.  I committed a bit of a sin: I went to classes today.  I also went to classes on Wednesday.  Sorry, folks - at least I disinfected my hands and coughed into the crook of my arm, like they say ta’….

And for the MIT student, lest there be any doubt lingering in your mind, I submit to you this acid test of your health: you know you are sick when your mathematics professor abbreviates on the board “analytic function” with the first four letters of the first word and the first three of the second, and it doesn’t occur to you to laugh.

I don’t like staying home when I am sick, see.  I hate to fall behind in work.  But I was fairly-well invalided by this flu.  Dizzy spells and all.  After sufficient time with vacant stare in my office, I hobbled back the 100 meters or so from lab to home (one perk of living on campus), fell onto my bed, and attempted to assume the position of least pain.  And, after an hour or two of rest, I pulled out my laptop and wrote some code or graded some papers (effectively, though not efficiently) ’till my body threw in the towel for the day.

It’s funny that you become aware of your body during intense, though basic, experiences.  Let me explain what I mean: when the sun sets the sky on fire, the water of a river reflecting the fire, the wind blowing over the cool river and through the tufty clouds set aflame and through your hair, you take a deep breath and thrill at being alive.  And when you can’t really breath properly, nor think straight, nor sit up straight, and you are suddenly too hot and suddenly too cold and nothing feels right, and your orifices are far too involved with expelling all manner of unpleasantness than taking in the lovely sight just described, well, you may not thrill at being alive, but you are certainly aware of your body much more than you are usually.

When you’re deep in thought, however, as many of us graduate students aspire to be much of time, you’re consciousness is fairly-well focused in on a few abstract concepts, far removed from such mundane things like appendages and membranes (to clarify for the medical workers: your own appendages and membranes, not other people’s).  Experimentalists, too.  Sure, you may be aware of parts of your body while in the workplace.  You may find your hands woefully huge and clumsy and unsteady when picking at your samples with your tweezers under the microscope (been there).  Or you may sweat from lugging around huge blocks of steel and copper typical of places like the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (there now - it’s good exercise, and I love my hard hat).  But you’re seldom aware of the fact that you are a living, breathing (or, in my case, trying-to-breath) organism, with lots of elegant (and some not-so-elegant) stuff going on inside.

Perhaps it’s the way the feedback system works.  The unconscious body may not be interested in talking to the conscioussness unless something’s wrong (quit that) or needed (gimme’ this).  When everything’s accounted for, we feel “fine”, which is to say, we’re not really conscious of anything that’s not fine.  When we need a little peace, we go out and enjoy that sunset ’till we’ve had our fill, or go out for a bit of exercise, and when it’s done, we recede into our thoughts.  When we haven’t slept in…too long, or when we’re sick, we’re also very aware of our mortal confines.  And then, we sleep, or get well, and are scarcely aware of the body anymore.

Too bad.  The body is a marvelous thing, with beauties and ironies and fatal flaws to rival the most interesting novel.  And best of all, it can be quite humorous (get it? har har har!).

I will blog some more on this subject.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go gather up my lungs….