This impending cold that's been threatening for the last couple of days still hasn't actually broken out full-force. It's just skulking around, making me a little sinusy and a bit achy, and a twee feverish at night, come to think of it, which may help explain the dream. Why is it that when I get feverish at night, I can never recognize this fact and take something to bring my temperature down a bit? No, it's always toss and turn with these strange irrational ideas going through my head, like that I need to make the walls blue by concentrating, and then I'll be able to fall asleep again and catch the bus. It provides kind of a terrifying perspective on mental illness to me -- if it's this easy to get into a state in which one can't actually comprehend what medication will do for oneself, I can understand the frightening implications of delusional and depressive disorders (especially ones that reinforce paranoia), in terms of how hard it can be to bring someone who's lapsed in their self-medication back onto the program.

But anyway, in my own state right now, it's the body that's more noticably in trouble right now. Bit of a sore throat, but more just a general soreness, that expresses itself in an unwillngness to move. Which is basically okay, in that it's Sunday and I don't need to do nothing. Well, that's not technically true, I really ought to check my mail from the office and go in to restart my checkin if it got aborted again, but in my current state, I'm not leaving the apartment, or more specifically, one of my fabulously comfortable chairs, without really compelling reason, such as "we will take away this small child's toy unless you leave the apartment." Once, when I was much younger, I was with my family somewhere near Rye on Long Island Sound, and a green children's bouncy-ball, with bright primary-colored design and the words "Choo-Choo Train" washed up. There was nobody else around within like a mile or so. We wound up scooping it up and bringing it home, and it sat with all the other balls in our tiny little back hallway by the door and I played with it now and again. But it always made me uneasy, every time I picked it up, because all I could think of was the poor kid whose ball it had been, who'd watched his treasured ball float out across the Sound, or had finished a day at the beach traumatized and unable to find it. up scooping it up and bringing it back

But anyway, I've declared today a sweatpants day, because I need that extra buffer of high-comfort low-formality clothing. Combine this with the fall colors outside (and the pale blue sunny sky) and the lazy Sunday feeling, and it's very much like waking up to a lazy Sunday back at school. The key difference being, in this case, that there's no Sunday brunch with waffle machine waiting for me. The best part about the waffle machine, I thought, was the ability to make undercooked waffles, for just about any level of "undercooked" you wanted. You could pop them out thirty seconds early (you could guess reasonably well, based on the position of the timer knob, or you could just pour yourself some raw batter, if your particular boat floated in raw batter.

I had this ambition, never actually realized, to make a differential waffle iron, one which was hot only at one end, and which would produce for you a differentially-cooked waffle, one whose degree of doneness various continuously and roughly linearly from a done end to a batter end. Eating your differential waffle, you'd be able to comprehend on a fully-intuitive level the precise journey a waffle makes on its way from batter to Belgian. It'd be sort of like those chocolate sampler boxes that give you samples of chocolate ranging from 5% cocoa up through 89%, except that the waffle would, in theory, contain every single degree of doneness in between, whereas the chocolate sampler contains only five or six.