If this is what 52 feels like, let me be the first to tell you that it sucks. Oh, I know the illness is just a passing flu, an unfortunate and coincidental convergence of a birthday and an illness, but I'm accustomed to feeling better, no matter what kind of abuse I heap upon my body. Turning 50 and living through 51 were both easy enough, as if I were just sampling this age, as if I were just visiting this decade and could return to the forties or earlier if I chose. But 52 somehow seems like an irrevocable commitment to this decade. Oh well, I suppose I am committed to it.

The flu made me so uncomfortable this morning that I skipped the monthly board meeting at the fellowship. I called the vice-chair at 8 AM to let her know I wouldn't be attending either the meeting or the service this morning, and to invite her to savor this taste of the power she will no doubt enjoy by the bellyful when she becomes fellowship chair in June.

I also called Betty, the services coordinator from work, at her home to get a certain fix on the due date for grades for the students in classes that ended last week. I had three memos with three different dates, issued by three different sources. Betty advised me that grades were due tomorrow. Unfortunately, Betty's word is law on this matter (and whining doesn't work on her), so later today I must slog my way through the twenty papers that I haven't yet evaluated.

Today I've broken up the grading with occasional forays into the journals of others, two catnaps, two homework sessions with Owen, and two showers.

I'll get over it -- the age and the flu.

Today I don't have the attention span to make it through a New Yorker cartoon. How am I supposed to grade these suckers? I could toss them from the top of the stairs, give high marks to the papers that make it to the bottom, lower marks to those that make it most of the way, etc. Probably as reasonable a system as any.