Saturday, September 09, 2023

The haze lifts, revealing the wreckage

The first sign that I was emerging from my Covid-induced haze was an urge to get into the kitchen and process a whole mess o' garden vegetables. I haven't cooked a thing in days and have barely eaten anything, surviving mostly on zucchini bread and chunks of cantaloupe. Even making toast seemed like too much work. 

Yesterday I spent most of the day postponing folding a basket of clean laundry, and then when I finally got up and did it, I felt that the effort I'd expended deserved, at the very least, the Presidential Medal of Honor. This morning, on the other hand, I roasted eggplants to make babaganoush and made a stuffed cabbage pie--both at the same time. Multitasking again! I feel almost normal.

Almost. Looking over some emails I sent yesterday, I see some prose that's, um, unpolished. Sloppy. Not entirely clear. I had set up some online activities for my Friday classes and I thought my instructions were perfectly clear, but some emails from students suggest confusion. Now I'm kind of afraid to go and look at what I asked them to do. It's impossible to assess one's ability to think clearly when one is not thinking clearly, so it could have seemed perfectly reasonable to instruct my students to hop on one foot while reciting the Preamble to the Constitution. Not that I did that. I hope.

Now that I can think clearly (I think!), I need to go and look at those online responses and make the final preparations for Monday's classes. I can't go back to campus until Tuesday, no matter how normal I may feel, but I can at least enjoy the opportunity to feel the brain cells sparking once again.

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