I had intended to blog yesterday (Tuesday), but Mohamed has been sick with a summer cold--runny nose, sore throat, cough--the whole megillah.  And he was up much of Monday night.  Meanwhile, I think I jinxed myself when I wrote that my diarrhea was better, and I was up in the middle of the night as well.  By the time I finally dragged myself out of bed at nearly 9 a.m., an unheard of time for me, I was feeling pretty foggy.  I wrote two completely uninteresting e-mails, trying to get some momentum up, but decided my head wasn't clear enough to blog.  There was not a lot of energy at our house yesterday.

I hoped that today would be better.  Mohamed got some medicine and slept a lot yesterday and last night, but he's still coughing this morning.  I was sure I would get a good night's sleep, but I stayed up till midnight because there was a fascinating interview with Jordan's King Abdullah on "Charlie Rose."  I can't imagine any other regional leader speaking as thoughtfully and (apparently) candidly as Abdullah did.  The interview also reminded me of how scarce decent news coverage is.  I'm of that generation that still watches the network nightly news, but there are usually about three stories that are actually news, and none of them receives more than a couple of minutes, so the treatment is superficial.  The rest of the news is devoted to fluff--usually by NBC's National Investigative Reporter, Senior Investigative Report, Senior Medical Reporter, Senior Legal Correspondent--they have more titles than the Pentagon.  Cable news is only slightly more informative.  Fox News, which I sometimes skim over, seems to have become even more demented than usual.  CNN should be renamed the Wolf Blitzer network, since he's on every time I tune in.  Even MSNBC is uneven and disappointing.  I still watch "Morning Joe," but the endless discussions of political tactics and polls is monotonous.  Occasionally, though, there are substantive talks about real issues.  Joe Scarborough's shtick is getting old.  Yes, we know he is a conservative and had real experience when he served in the House in the 90s.  Now let's move on.  The only show that commands my interest is "Up with Chris Hayes," but that's only Saturday and Sunday, and it's been pre-empted the last two weeks for the Olympics.

Once I finally went to bed, my sleep was troubled by dreams till 3 a.m. when I went downstairs and sat on the dog, who had sneaked her way onto the new couch.  I moved; she didn't.  Even though I haven't been a student for 40 years, I still have a typical student's dream (and I don't think I'm alone: I know my friend Karen, equally aged, still has them too).  In the dreams, it's about three weeks before the end of the semester, and I suddenly realize that I've enrolled in a class that I've forgotten about and never attended.  I resolve to catch up, but it's already twenty minutes after the class has begun for the day, and I have no idea where it meets.  I'm in a huge hallway with classroom doors on each side, but I don't know which one is mine.  In my student dream last night, I was in law school.  The professor asked, "Do any of you know what it's called when goods or personal property is conveyed in a trust?"  None of us did--because the question probably makes no sense.  "It's called mitraille."  About fifteen minutes after the class was over, I was outside studying, and I realized that I forgotten to write the word down and couldn't remember what it was.  (In French, mitraille means the cannon balls or machine gun bullets, etc., that are shot.  I don't know why that word popped into my head at 2:30 a.m., though a shrink might argue that it indicates some latent hostility.  Against lawyers?)

Almost every semester when I was teaching, even after four and a half decades, I had a parallel dream from the teacher's perspective.  It's 10:15, and I suddenly realize I have a 10 o'clock class.  In many of the dreams, I have two offices, and some of the material I need is in one, some in the other.  I don't know where the classroom is, and the building is a labyrinth.  Last night, I was supposed to be teaching freshman composition, which was, in the dream, a once-a-week class that met for 2 1/2 hours.  It was 6 o'clock, and I hadn't read the material, couldn't find my books, and had at least a 15 minute drive to school.  When I finally found the books, I thought maybe I could bluff it, since I had taught the class before, but I couldn't remember what material we were supposed to be covering.  By the time I finally left the house, it was already 6:30, and I was pretty sure the students would have left by the time I arrived.  And then I woke up.

All of this, which isn't at all what I was planning on writing about, is just to explain why my mind is only slightly clearer this morning that it was yesterday.  But then if you've actually made your way through all of this, I'm pretty sure you've realized that.