I’m still sick, bleach. This morning I dragged myself out of bed for an appointment, then crashed again and spent most of the afternoon asleep and dreaming about airports and motion. I left my laptop on the plane, then when I was trying to find it I couldn’t get off of the moving walkway, until I bumped, literally, into my friend Mark who was also stumbling along trying to get to his flight. We put our arms around each other and started limping toward the flight (in real life we are both fairly fit, but in the dream he was walking with a cane and we both kept falling over). We turned a corner and suddenly there were steep and narrow stairs, going down for a hundred feet or more. We were clinging to one another and to the rail, trying to make the descent without falling. All very symbolic, I’m sure.

When I woke up, it was raining quite hard in Boston. My skylight — a prominent feature in my life — had water pouring down it, almost a river. It was very beautiful and peaceful. I stayed in my cozy bed for another hour before I could drag myself out and get online to start doing some work. Hey, I’m getting over the flu.

The first thing I did online was to book a flight to Chicago for March. I’m very excited, both for the conference itself — my first as an employee of InterVarsity — and because it sounds like I will be able to visit my favorite literary society, Bagshot Row, in Dubuque in the same trip. These are kindred spirits in literature, theology, art, life, faith, wonder, joy, frustration, healing, etc. They are some of my best friends in life, despite the fact that I have never met any of them in person. Yet! But that will be changing soon! I’ll get to visit some of them in March — sadly, on Tyler’s birthday but sans Tyler — and then I’ll be back in May for Riley and Jacquie’s wedding. Now if only David and Bethany could manage to make it…

Now it is rainy and dark, and I should get more work done but I’m dubious that that is going to happen. In an hour or two I will be watching a movie with my housemates — The Machinist, supposedly based on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. We shall see.