My older brother doesn’t try to meet up with us when my sister-in-law calls him.

Get me some wings and take pictures, he tells her. But in place of taking pictures (she has forgotten her phone) she decides to buy him a calendar.

Why is Daddy getting a calendar? my niece asks.

He’s going to read it to your brother, I say. My nephew has been found smuggling Maxim magazines and tearing out pictures of hot girls. He’s only 3.

Can I have one, too? she asks.

Sorry, sweetie, your uncle is being a dork.

My wife says that I get sick because I miss my students. I think she’s joking because if any student reads this they’re probably getting excited about the prospect of a substitute teacher the day they return from vacation.

In the past three years

1. Two years ago: while my wife’s traveling on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I develop a fever that entire weekend.
2. Last year: I lose my voice the last week of school and remain ill until just before we return.
3. This year: I’ve been somewhat ill for the two weeks leading up to break, but it waits until I’m settled in, there’s big snow to shovel and many things to do, for it to hit me full blast.

I think I’m going to want a vacation to recover from my vacation.

It could be worse, I suppose. I could be around students AND sick. However, then I’d be happy because then I’d get to be the contagious one.

All after-school activities are canceled. Please check the website before you call or come in to school tomorrow.

I’m excited. Our school system is a safe haven, a place where students can go even when no one else can be with them. They are fed here through a government program, and the building is heated even though home may not be.

It’s very difficult for me to think of a time when the school has ever closed due to accumulated snow.

I finish writing my exam anyway and go to bed, thinking of a day spent at idle pursuits. 16 days off was starting to look like 17. Even without the school closing, it would not be unreasonable for me to call it in when so many students would be doing the same.

The plan starts with waking up kind of late and staring in horror at the snow that has completely covered the streets, my car, and my walk.

Oh dear, I say to my wife, how will I ever make it on time?

Little do I know that she has a plan, too.

This morning at five AM, she wakes up and I curl into a ball. I’m awake, I tell her, don’t worry about me. I’ll look at the snow a little later.

Get up, she says. (It’s a very devious plan)

Later, I say, it’s too early.

Well, at least look at the website, she tells me, maybe there was enough snow to actually close you guys.

I’m up out of bed in an instant, run over to the computer and login.

We’re open.

It’s too cold to go back to bed.

And now I’m at work on lunch writing this blog.

And muscles don’t secretly work out on their own, either. So when a coworker asks if you’ve been working out when you’ve actually been doing the opposite (slacking out), then what can you possibly say in return?

1. Why yes, yes I have (while sucking in the gut).
2. Why, have you?
3. Not really. Just several miles here and there.
4. No, I’m just naturally like this (technically true)

I can’t imagine why anyone would make this mistake. Or if it itsn’t a mistake, then it’s sabotage. They know that such a comment would demoralize and distract me.

If anything, I think I gained weight the minute she asked me about my muscles.

It’s okay though. I fully intend to workout.

Next week. Or month. Or year.

How do I reach this state? Wind. Wind and trees and power lines.

From a mild 40-50 degree Sunday, the temperature drops and frozen rain falls. At 2:30 in the morning, the lights go out and I’m no longer typing out questions or 25 flaws or any of that other meme stuff. At 3:30, the lights come back on and I finish my work.

When I wake up in the dark at 5:30, the power is gone again, and I shower and change and rustle through the house. It’s like a really bad video game! In order to find the candles, I have to find my cell phone or a flashlight. In order to find my cell phone I have to find my manbag. In order to find the flash light I have to remember where it was kept in the dark. When I finally find candles, there is a lighter to find, except I only turn up batteries. Later, I need the batteries to listen to the radio and verify that nothing’s wrong.

And I dress in the dark.

My clothes don’t match and not once does anyone say anything. It’s like I’ve trained the entire building to overlook fashion emergencies.

Now if I could only do something about the cold.

Every now and then I order something on the Internet that I don’t have delivered to my two safe zones–work or parents’ house. It’s already bad enough that when a box arrives my dad just asks me if it’s my “little men” of miniature toy soldiers, or that the office staff tells me they got presents for me when they put a box of traded Monsterpocalypse figures in my mailbox. And this time, for some reason, I didn’t want to share the delivery of my Playstation 3.

(I don’t care that my coworker sold me my current PS2 and I cradled it in my arms right in front of my students. That was different)

So yesterday I drive home down the street and I see a truck blocking the road. I consider making several right turns to navigate the blocks to get around it and onto a side street that leads up to my home.

But that’s when I notice that the truck is brown and flashing its lights. The United Parcel Service owns this vehicle, and I’m still waiting for a shipment.

Instead of avoiding it, I tailgate and then circumvent it when it pulls up to a corner. When I turn, I constantly flick my eyes to watch it in my rear view mirror. It turns the opposite way and then it performs a three point turn to head toward my house.

And pass my block entirely. No Playstation on Thursday.

On Friday, I head to dinner to meet some former coworkers. It’s a good time filled with gossip, madness, and lies. However, I check my phone only to see that my wife has called me.

UPS was here, she says to me on the voicemail as my heart leaps, but I wasn’t home then. There’s a slip of paper here… And my heart is shot out of the sky.

The rest of the night I wait for the waiter to take my to-go order so that we can blow that budget Italian restaurant and get to the important business of picking up a package at the local UPS warehouse. I fidget, I fumble, I fork my pasta.

Finally, I’m free, and driving home to pick up the slip. I consider pulling over to call home and get the relevant numbers, but I’m near the scary forest preserves and am unwilling to stop there.

I hit ever stop light, stop sign, and stopped bus on the way home.

So now I have a weekend to plot the arrival of the PS3. I will win this hunt next time, UPS, and I will kill, skin and eat the prey that you carry to my front porch. But for now, maybe I should figure out which games to get first.

As an Internet denizen who regularly participates in various “communities,” I am not immune.

So it didn’t take long for my net persona to leak into my real world relationships which, as it turns out, really pissed off some people near and dear to me.

I hit the reset button.

Thanks for everyone who re-added me to their Friends list. You of all people know that I use this application to avoid socializing in person and find it useful to keep me far far away.

And for those of you didn’t re-add me? Well, it’s not like you can read this anyway. (well you can on the regular blog, but not if you read this on my Facebook notes).

Today I try to fix the problem.

The idea is to get big plastic clingy sheets to cover your window so that the cold that gets through the glass stops (cold) at the plastic. I think. However it’s supposed to work, it does work, except on days that would freeze an ice cube.

I suppose we could hire someone to install new windows. Or we could move to a better house.

Or a warmer place.

Bunt instead I’m there with a big plastic sheet and a hair dryer shrinking the thing tightly against the window and feeling like a dummy. I feel like a crazy man waving that thing slowly back and forth in the dark late afternoon backlit by bathrooms and bedrooms.

So I turn off the light.

In the midst of trying to hide my shame, I notice that I’ve sealed a piece of garbage on the opposite side of the plastic. I think of the Wrath of Khan and pretend that I’m Kirk talking to a doomed Spock on the other side of the sheet.

Spock/Garbage: …logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

Kirk/Me: Or the one.

Spock/Garbage: You are my superior officer. You are also my friend. I have been and always shall be yours.

Translation for the non-trekkies: Don’t open up this plastic just to rescue me. I love you, I’ll miss you, good-bye.

/tear

However, I don’t want to use a sick day.

I know, what want doesn’t get, need does, but that doesn’t make me happy about it. For one thing, I’ve missed a bunch of days and a few things are left hanging at work. For another, I need sick days for a disease or something and not some lame bug that I can squash with lifestyle improvements.

Then there’s the want discussion.

I want sick days for when I’m not sick. There’s too much time wasted on being ill, and not only do we lose a sense of accomplishment for doing things we’re paid to do, we also get to feel gross on top of that.

What we need are more wtf-ever days. Not wt-fever days, what-the-frick ever. Feeling too good to go to work? Take a What-the-frick ever day.

I wish this was one of those days.

On the upside, at least I’m not recovering from stopping random acts of violence at work (sideglance at Ms. C)

Fah, back to grading papers over a rusty cough.

My co-worker D– stops me in the hall. I don’t know how you function, Felix, she says.

I don’t know what she means, and then I see her looking at the thing a student confused with a pizza box. You got pizza? he kept asking me.

It’s my new desktop! I say, with everything I usually leave on my desk.

It’s made out of the boxtops used to hold reams of paper, so there’s a ready source of re-usable boxtops in the building. Everything that I normally stack and stuff into the confines of some kind of bag I now shuffle into assorted piles and– well, I pile them.

The result is a wonder to behold. If you’re me. For some reason, I don’t think it’s going to catch on.