Heathcliff (is in my lungs)

I was sick last week with bronchitis. Nurse Sarah called it a newborn virus, which means you hope it happens to you before you turn two. I guess when you are two, your schedule is a lot more flexible and people are less likely to yell at you for getting behind in your responsbilities because all you do is take naps all day. Anyway, take naps all day is all I did, for days. It got boring even while it was still necessary. I didn't realise how dopey I was until I tried to read and couldn't understand the plot. It was an Edith Wharton book, so not that much to understand: young lady who is not quite destitute but almost is willful and refuses to let her heart be constrained by the poverty of her circumstances. Later this weekend it made more sense. Except for the end, but I think that was the fault of Wharton, not me. I was reading "Summer" and I've previously read "The House of Mirth", but what's with ending every story with your heroine falling into a hazy kind of stupor in which she, to her own incredulity, does exactly what she's been fighting against the whole book? Canonical chops and critical praise notwithstanding, I don't know if I feel up to reading more Wharton if I know I'm going to spend the last twenty pages of the book going, "Noooooooooooo. Ugh."

I guess I'll just clutch my handkerchief to my lips and utter another TB-like cough (upper respitory track infections are so romantic) and swallow my bad-smelling antibiotics. And try not to get impregnated by tepid youths who would love me for all eternity if they weren't accidentally sort of, whoops, engaged to someone else. If I've learned nothing else from Wharton, I've learned that. I wish she had called one of her books "Why Buy The Cow?"

Cough cough cough cough cough cough.