Gotta Catch a Cold with Ash Ketchum

I hate being ill. It's not the sickness itself that bugs me, it's the absolute futility in which one finds oneself. Actually being ill doesn't bother me; indeed, with the amount of allergies I fight against on my daily basis, I'm more than used to crippling sneezing fits and random phlegmy coughs. No,the thing that gets me down is being physically unable to go about my daily business.

In the last six years, I have taken a grand total of three days off work. The first was after being sent home from school in Kisarazu when I nigh on passed out in the middle of a class due to one of the plethora of bugs that fly around child-laden classrooms. When you spend your day to day life in a stuffy classroom surrounded by snotty, wheezy children,mits inevitable that eventually you'll succumb to one of their ailments.

The second was last year when, suffering from a crippling migraine, I foolishly accepted an unlabelled painkiller from my manager and thereafter spent the next twenty four hours recovering from anaphylactic shock.

And then came this morning.

After spending the last week fighting off the flu that has been flying around the college - indeed, what with moving house and dealing with Manami's likewise sickness, I've been far too busy and important to be bothered with such luxuries as influenza - I awoke feeling quite literally like death warmed up. Inability to move, my voice a tiny husk, and my chest feeling like a baby elephant had been asleep on it, I realised that after battling my way through classes the last three days, I was actually in no fit state to teach

Filled with the helpless self loathing that comes with the bad kind of duvet day, I have spent the last twelve hours slipping in and out of consciousness to an eclectic mix of John Hughes movies and the first season of Pokemon. So in need of comfort as I am, I even went as far as to break my own "no anime in English" rule and forwent my usual Japanese refresher course that comes with regaling in the adventures of Satoshi, Takeshi and Mitsuki (or Ash, Brock and Misty as they are more often known round these parts!).

That's the thing about teaching you see; one of the forgotten disadvantages is that you spend your entire working day sitting in a hot bed of sneezes and diseases, and yet you can't let yourself fall foul to any of them. Any drainage of energy will effect your performance (in both senses of the word), and it's a rare class indeed that will forgive you for a useless lesson (and on that note, a big thank you goes out to my afternoon class yesterday for laughing off my uncharacteristic exhaustion!)

Hopefully by tomorrow morning, I'll be back in working order, otherwise it's going to be another day of eighties cheese and poorly dubbed animation. 

Coughs and sneezes - gotta catch 'em all!