Sick
Woke up Sunday morning with a bit of a sore throat, but it went away within an hour or so, so I didn't think much of it. Too much talking Saturday, maybe, I thought.
Woke up Monday morning with a sore throat again, which worsened over the course of the day, until by the time I saw Mary Anne off from Penn Station, my nose was really starting to drip. Bought and used lots of Kleenex (or rather, off-brand disposable paper tissue product). Met up with Karen K after she got off work, and she recommended cold medicine; somehow it never occurs to me to take any. I'm something of a Puritan deep down, in some respects, and part of that is the odd idea that I shouldn't mess with my body by drugging it with unnatural substances that will mask the symptoms of illness while ignoring the causes. But we stopped and picked up some Sudafed Severe Cold tablets, and I took one, and felt better almost immediately, which made me much happier and more capable of interacting with people. My throat and head stopped hurting and the sniffles dried up. (I still took care not to share food with my dinner companions, though.) A couple hours later, after dinner, the symptoms came back, and I took another tablet; it didn't help as much as the first, but helped some. A couple NyQuils just before bed rounded out the day.
I'd forgotten, sadly, that one NyQuil is good for 4 hours' sleep, while two are also good for 4 hours' sleep. I shoulda taken one, then another when I woke up. So last night was probably the third or fourth consecutive night of my getting 4-5 hours' sleep, plus occasional dozing over the next couple hours. Oh, well. Sleep is for the weak.
Today, had a nice long lunch with a book editor (I said that so nonchalantly that you may have no idea how cool I think it sounds). The editor's advice for the day (paraphrased heavily, so may not be a precisely accurate representation): if an editor wants to contact a particular author (who has an agent) to see if the author's working on anything interesting, it's easiest if the author's web page provides contact information for the author's agent. I don't know if there's some protocol that says authors shouldn't say online who their agents are; maybe agents don't like that information to be publicly available. But apparently it's useful information for editors to have.
Anyway, I'm now sitting in the New York Public Library main building at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue, with my PowerBook plugged in and connected via ethernet to the Internet, reading submissions and editing stories. Sometimes I love technology. (I should mention, btw, that my online access is so limited this trip that I'm basically ignoring everything except this journal. In particular, I'm not reading anyone else's journals, and I probably won't try to catch up when I get home. So if you have news you want me to know, send me email.)
The cold has gotten a little better—long periods of no sniffles at all today even without the Sudafed—but is still there. Alas.
Tomorrow: Amtrak to Boston, where I'll spend the next two weeks. I'm just hoping the cold doesn't last that whole time—last time I was in Boston, I spent a week being too sick to do much of anything, including sleep. No fun.
