With the exception of my bout with mono, I don’t ever remember being sidelined by an illness quite like this. I mean, yes, sometimes I get a stomach bug and am out of commission for a day or so. But today marks the third day in a row where I have come home and pretty much fallen asleep immediately. And today it was simply while I was changing out of my work clothes!

I am going to optimistically believe it’s a minor flu or a major cold and that it will clear by the weekend. If it doesn’t, I suppose I’ll have to hunt down a doctor when I get back from Pittsburgh next week…

Or, in the Queen’s English, I have a cold in my nose.

From a biological standpoint, the cold is probably coursing throughout my body, but it seems mostly to have settled in my head. Unfortunately, in addition to my nose, it also is affecting my balance and my cognitive abilities (particularly my ability to type). Some will try to attribute it to jet lag, but I think they’d be mistaken. Sneezing and runny noses rarely accompany the official diagnosis of desynchronosis (for those of you who travel to places where Latin is spoken on a regular basis).

I seem to have a lot of travel on my schedule for the month of October, so I’m hoping the cold will disappear quickly and go harass people who don’t have so much to do. For my part, I will sneeze on as many strangers as I can to get this bug out of my system quickly.

I will live to regret this decision later tonight, but when my body (or, possibly, the cats) decided I should be awake at 5 a.m., I decided to agree with it. So I’ve been sitting here in the dark coolness of the living room, lit only by the intermittently working backlight of our laptop, for the last 90 minutes. And I have to say it hasn’t been that bad. In fact, it’s been quite peaceful.

This morning was scheduled to be cloudy here in D.C., so it hasn’t gotten light with the sunrise, but periodically I peek at the Andrus Field cam at Wesleyan to see how sunrise (and early morning activity) progresses elsewhere. They are much more diligent than I, as they are all wearing more than a bathrobe and are doing industrious things like walking, driving, and turning on and off lights. (Oh, wait, I did most of those things this morning, too… Nevermind…)

The alarm clock just started beeping to tell us to wake up. Maybe I will make some tea. Or maybe I will just sit here a few more minutes and enjoy a little bit more tranquility before the Burrow starts bustling with back-to-work activity.

Today my second cousin, Caroline, weds her true love, David.

Caroline is my jet-setting cousin, who worked her way across Australia after college, spent six months in South America when she turned 30, and trekked through Tibet on holiday.

She also invited the Yale football team to have their picture taken with us on her family’s first visit to the U.S. back when we were both teenagers. She’s a cute blonde with an infectious smile, so of course they said yes.

I haven’t met David yet, although my brother Josh says he seems like a nice guy. He passed Caroline’s crucial travel test. I’m glad on both counts. Caroline deserves the very best.

My best friend Karen’s birthday is today.

I’ve written about Karen in many other posts, but I want to extol her virtues again today. (Because, after all, what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t gush about your friends periodically?)

We met my junior year in high school when we shared an AP history class with Mr. Doyle. We had friends (or at least friends of friends) in common. I don’t actually remember when we transitioned from knowing each other to being friends, but it happened sometime that year before we started studying for the AP exam together (it may have been the study sessions that cemented the friendship, though).

Karen was my lifeline through the second half of high school. Things felt very tumultuous in my life and she was always there to provide moral support, a wry comment, or a friendly voice late at night.

Somehow she seemed to know that I just needed to know she was there. One night we played word association games over the phone, getting stranger and stranger as the night went on.

Always up for a challenge, together we have tried on scary gold lamé dresses at Filene’s, played piano at Steinway in Boston, and driven, lost and off-roading, through the hills of the Housatonic Valley. We’ve seen Erin McKeown play in a New Haven living room, Mary Chapin Carpenter play in Madison Square Garden, and Sting play at the Meadows.

When I’m feeling sad or depressed or down, there’s no one else who will do. Rudi’s even learned to ask if I’ve spoken to Karen recently when he can’t figure out how to cheer me up. He knows that no matter how blue I am when I begin a phone call with her, I’ll be in much better spirits later on.

In addition to playing the piano beautifully, Karen also is remarkably clever and creative. In college, her letters were the envy of all my friends because they were so colorful and full of stickers and quotes and facts. One letter, in particular, she wrote in a variety of codes that I had to solve before I could find out what her latest news was. Unfortunately, that was a day I stopped by the post office before my environmental studies class, so I’m not sure I learned a whole lot from Professor Niering that day. She now employs her ingenuity for a company that creates and sells word puzzle books.

We have one of those friendships that transcend time and place. We can go weeks without talking and pick up as if it had been yesterday. Our visits last late into the night. But I never am ready for visits to end and I wish now that we could still talk every day like we did back in high school. Some people never find a person who understands them and who feels comfortable telling them when they’re being unpleasant (finding people who think those things but don’t care enough to tell you is much more common). And I’ve had that person in my life for a full half of it now. How tremendously blessed and lucky I am…

I’m not home to call her and wish her a merry day and happy wishes and a fortuitous future. So I will ask anyone reading to do so for me in the comments. (Kare, if no one leaves you a message, it will simply indiate that all my other readers are in England…)

So, Kare, have a happy, happy, happy birthday. May it bring you blue skies, cheerful animals (at appropriate hours), and great joy over the year to come.

I don’t think it’s just been Rudi and me. I think the cats must be at least partially responsible for some of it.

I don’t think it’s all going to get cleaned. I suppose it doesn’t really matter. It will give Rudi’s student who is cat sitting for us realistic expectations of how life will and won’t change after graduation. (All friends who have ever seen my college rooms will appreciate that you can actually walk through the whole apartment.)

Today I wandered through the Adams Morgan Day festivities — ate some Indian food ($3 bought me a gigantic samosa and a mango lassi) — before returning home to realize that it was Sept. 11.

Four years have passed. For someone who was not directly affected by loss of family or friends, it seems to be my own personal timeframe for mourning is over and that it is now simply enough to honor and remember.

Or it could be that recent events have numbed me to such a degree that I don’t have sufficient room in my heart to grieve anymore for those whose deaths have been grieved over so much.

The number of people who turned out for this morning’s memorial walk here in D.C. would indicate that I am in the minority. Or perhaps that is simply others’ way of remembering and honoring. I don’t know.

I don’t know where my copy of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is right now, but I believe the main character reaches a point of clarity in his life when he realizes that he shouldn’t complain about his family burdening him with their problems because they’re his family. That’s sort of how I feel about mass human tragedies — that we shouldn’t complain about being overburdened by other people’s misery because we are all part of the same greater family.

Sometimes it’s just hard to remember that.