His brain becomes as soft as cheese! ... He cannot think, he only sees!

[freckles_and_doubt]

Reading, the lost art. My last two days have been hideous because nameless individuals scatter-shot emailed the entire student body with instructions on what to do if you're facing academic exclusion, i.e. haven't passed enough courses to be permitted to continue. Buried in the second paragraph of this communication, below the giant red headline about ACADEMIC EXCLUSION!, is an instruction that this applies only to students who find themselves excluded once the results come out. From the number of phone calls, emails and students in my office all panicking needlessly about the email telling them they're excluded, only a tiny fraction of them actually read that far. I can't work out if I'm more narked at the twit who emailed so thoughtlessly, or all the non-reading students.

So, in fact, it's not just reading, the lost art; it's thinking.

I certainly am not thinking at the moment, not so you'd notice. Monday's sinus headache kept me off work on Tuesday, mostly sleeping; yesterday was OK, if a bit spacey, but today the rampagings of Sid have gone from the "Ow" setting on the throb-o-metre all the way across to "Epic sledgehammer." I'm at the stage where the student phone call that occupied my last five minutes caused me to spend most of it wistfully eyeing the Advil I'd popped out of its bubble but hadn't taken owing to the phone interrupting me before I could hunt down a glass of water. Life Skills To Acquire: chugging tablets without water. I can't do it. My throat rebels and there are nasting gagging noises. It's all horribly inefficient. Also, ow.