I hope this post isn't contagious!

Despite all the major projects I need to tackle over summer break, I spent a good part of yesterday trying to write a song about borborygmi, not exactly my favorite topic but one that was on my mind constantly as I recover, slowly, from the gastrointestinal virus steamrolling its way through my entire family. This morning as I left the house (for the first time since Saturday!), I warned my husband, who I hope is the last of us to be so stricken: "Don't expect to get back to full strength right away. It may take days." And sure enough this morning I found my stomach turning when I caught the merest whiff of the odors wafting from a local fast-food restaurant. When will I be able to eat again?

So we've been sick. Some of us are done being sick, I hope. At any rate I couldn't take another day sitting indoors waiting for some kind of food to appeal to me, so I set out to do some errands and attend a campus event, cheering for the accomplishments of some of my colleagues. Surely I'm no longer contagious, right? I would hate to be the vector for an epidemic of borborygmi. For one thing, it's hard to find a rhyme:

Borborygmi awakens me,
grumbling and complaining;
I try to keep it under wraps
but it's capable of sustaining
winds of such foul magnitude,
such furious intensity,
that I give up and hunker down,
embracing my borborygmi.