Tired to the bone
Gads, what a crash.
Night after finals some student pals invited me to a party the faculty happened to be having - waddaya know, I chose the perfect day for the test! (BTW, the wonderful thing about a party in a Catholic theological faculty is that everybody goes to mass first before lining up for the red wine and disco floor.) I drank a glass and a half; after Father V., my professor there, had had four or five, he leaned his elbow on the back of my chair as he reminisced about the happy days of his life - back when Emmanuel Levinas was teaching in Fribourg and then when he (Father V.) was the director of all the academic institutions in his order - his very own apartment in Rome, jetting to Fribourg twice a week for lectures and visiting schools and universities all over the world. But, alas, his term of duty has been over since 2002, and now he's just a perpetually melancholy theology professor in a provincial Swiss university. It's weird how one guy's dream is another guy's nightmare. I'm not exactly making fun of Father V. - he's been incredibly kind to me and I love his lecturs on philosophy of religion - but it's still weird. Anyway, I had an hour-and-a-half train ride back to Zürich, so I skipped before the dancing started, but it was still past midnight when I got home. Couldn't sleep that night.
Friday night we had a dinner for about 50 volunteers in the church's parent-youth-children program, and we professionals (a pastor and us two youth workers) were wearing bows and ties and serving tables. Nice do, really, but at some point during the evening I felt a sort of numb feeling stealing over me, and I could hardly walk straight, and I didn't feel like talking. I soldiered through as best I could and got home toward 1 am. Couldn't sleep that night either.
Plan for the weekend: attend Saturday morning meeting for musicians in my weekend church (i.e. the one I attend on weekends, not the one I work for), lead Saturday afternoon scout program for the church in Stäfa, lead Sunday morning children's worship service in my weekend church, play bass Sunday evening at same church's evening service, be back at work Monday.
What I actually ended up doing was having a stomach flu. Got to spend about 3 grueling hours Saturday morning excusing myself from appointments and/or finding replacements. Only then did I get to collapse in a whimpering pile. If my wife hadn't bailed me out by carry a load of material to Stäfa, I don't know how I'd have gotten through the day.
By evening I could keep some tea down. And Sue told me there was one last sleeping pill from my operation a couple years back. So come night time I downed three asprins and the sleeping pill and got my first night's sleep in more than a week. This morning (Sunday) I'm home - sitting in front of an electric heater, reading Fran McCour's Teacher Man, writing this and starting to consider the option of living to fight another day ...
P.S. How do you guys make semi-extraneous stuff disappear behind a hotlink?? I can't seem to make that work! Do that require a premium membership?