I sound like Tom Waits today.

I was trapped in a small room with 200 dusty, moldy, mildewy artworks for several hours yesterday. Not so much "trapped" literally but I had to dig through them for the 6 or 7 shite things left to us by a donor whose will was, shall we say, VAGUE and LACKING IN FUCKING DESCRIPTIONS. So I breathed in rather a lot of shit and now my throat and tonsils feel swollen and sore and raspy, and I sound like Tom Waits. It's awful. I barely made it through a 45-minute lecture last night, and tomorrow I have to teach for 75 minutes. I want a pill to make it better. My woo-woo friend K. was all, like, take some probiotics and echinacea and maybe an Airborne and some vitamin-C. And because I am irritable I went off on how bloody fucking stupid the Airborne concept is: "Hi, I'm a teacher! I don't know anything about nutrition, health, or science, so please buy my totally untested unverified snake oil because IT WAS MADE BY A TEACHER." I consider this pro-stupid thinking of the highest order.* What I want is some sort of synthetic over-priced snake oil that my insurance will pay for that ACTUALLY WORKS, even though it may have a lot of possibly deadly side-effects. Because not only am I feeling like ass, I am irritable. Because I THOUGHT I was merely going to go pick up some stuff, I didn't know I would be in an unventilated room full of airborne toxins for most of the morning and some of the afternoon.


*"Pro-stupid" is my new substitute term for "anti-intellectual." Let's just call a spade a spade, knowwhaimsayin?