Today, I had to stay home from school ’cause I was sick.

Not sure what happened. At first, I thought it was just the usual IBS BS, and that it would clear up once whatever was irritating my irritable bowels passed out of me. It’s been that way in the past, and while it’s not my idea of fun, it resolves itself fairly quickly. A couple hours at most.

But nope. Not this. Plus, it came with other symptoms, like nausea and confusion and, worst of all, an intense feeling of weakness.

So I am guessing it was something viral or microbial. I feel fairly normal now but I know I am not out of the woods yet. The bug or whatever might be on its way out, but I still feel kind of weak and out of it, so presumably the battle continues. I’ve been able to eat, which is good. Everything gets worse when I don’t or can’t eat.

I didn’t want to eat, but I made myself.

The trouble started last night at around 11 pm. Up until that point, I had not felt sick at all. Seemed like an ordinary night. But around 11 I started feeling fairly bad. It felt like something cold and disgusting was settling into my guts and making the bottom of my stomach ache like a toothache.

Thinking, like I said, that it was the usual IBS stuff, I tried going to the bathroom, but there was nothing “on deck”. And my long experience with IBS tells me that under no circumstances should I try to force that kind of thing. That only adds energy to the system I am wishing to quiet. I can ride the waves but I date not ever trying to work against them.

Only evil can come from that.

It got worse and worse for a while. In fact, there was a period where I was pretty sure things were going to come out the other way if they had to. But then it plateau’d and I was able to watch some stuff with Joe and Julian and go to bed like normal. I was worried I would have trouble getting to sleep, but sleeping pills are a wonderful thing. Also, counterintuitively, I found that lying on my stomach actually relieved the pain a little bit.

Then I wake up 7 am like usual, and my body plays a cruel trick on me. It convinces me that the problem has disappeared while I slept, and I was all ready to get my ass to school. I was looking forward to it, in fact, because today’s class was TV Script and we would FINALLY be getting to where we would be discussing the pages of my Bob’s Burgers episode!

So I got up, got dressed, and ate, and everything was fine (or at least, good enough). But then, about five minutes after I ate, I got super sick. It was about 50 percent worse than it had been at its worst the previous evening. So nope, no school for me, had to email the prof and say I would not be there.

That is probably why I have been so depressed today. Well, besides my physical symptoms of course. But that brief period of hope followed by my body saying NOPE NOPE NOPE was just plain depressing. It activated the “disappointment” center of my brain, and like I have said in this space before, I do not handle disappointment well. It has always messed me up. If I get my hopes (and energies) up and then the thing doesn’t happen, it takes me a while to bounce back.

So being both physically and mentally ill makes for a fairly non fun day. I ended up sleeping a bunch because it was pretty hard for me to concentrate enough to do anything else, even read, and when I am too messed up to read, I might as well hang up my shingle and sleep till the rain stops.

Plus, feeling very weak makes sleep very, very easy to achieve. And that was probably a good thing. Sleep lets out bodies really get down to fighting disease because it doesn’t have to support our energy-hogging conscious mind to support.

Did you know that our brains use 25 percent of our energy? It’s a fact!

So this morning and this afternoon are more or less a blur for me. I am pretty sure I did stuff for short periods of time but for the most part, it was sleep a couple hours, be awake for like half an hour max, then sleep another couple of hours.

I feel pretty okayish now. I don’t have a strong urge to crawl into bed and I had supper with no major negative reaction. So far so good. No matter what, I am not missing another day of school unless I am physically incapable of walking, because missing this day was depressing enough. If I miss two in a row, I am liable to go stir crazy.

Tomorrow I have another of those one-on-one meetings to discuss my movie, this time pages 25 through 50. I hope this second person, Keith, likes it as much as Jenny did. Or at least can fake it well enough to fool me. I’m enjoying the writing of it and it does me a lot of good to get some feedback as to whether or not I am doing anything even vaguely right.

Writing is a lonely profession and we writers are always desperate for feedback, at least when we’re just starting out. Presumably once we are established and well known and confident and are actually making a living stringing words together, the only feedback you care about is the feedback from the people who sign the checks.

That’s my dream and I am sticking to it.

So yeah… that’s where I stand. I don’t give a damn how I feel tomorrow, I will make it to class, or rather, to my one on one. It will only be 45 minutes long, so it should not be much of a strain.

Thursday, the day I have two classes, will just have to look out for itself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.