"I forgot to feel the President's glands."

Ugh, I hate being a blog slacker. Busy, busy, etc.

Except not, because I took a sick day on Monday, and slept all morning and then spent the afternoon crashed out on the couch with the first season of Bones (Hey, don't mock; at what point does cheesy and obvious outweigh pretty and charming? We shall see). I felt fantastic all day yesterday, but woke up this morning with my throat scratching and my lungs wheezing in a not-very-amusing way. Not cool, body. Not cool.

So maybe it's less "busy, busy," and more like "boring, boring." Which isn't really any better.

I did give up on a book recently, which is pretty unusual--the first hundred pages of Broken For You were fine, but I was reading on my break one day last week, and I reached the end of a sentence and said to myself, "I can't go on." It was all very swoony and dramatic, but I'm much happier now, having picked up The Best American Non-Required Reading 2006, an anthology of essays, short stories, graphic short stories, excerpts from scripts, and all kinds of non-categorizable writing excellence from, well, 2006. The most thought-provoking piece I've read so far is the Iraqi Constitution, which I admit that I a) didn't actually expect to finish, and b) am finding so dense that I'm reading it in five-page spurts. I'm finding it both hopeful and kind of depressing--hopeful because it lays out what sounds like a pretty good proposal, where everybody is treated well and the government functions for the good of the people, but depressing because I know that's not what's happening. It also brings up issues about the United States Constitution, and about Constitutions in general--where and when did we as people decide that a single document meant authority, and what is it that makes us (mostly) recognize that authority today? Why do the U.S. and Iraqi Constitutions cover so much that sounds so basic to human civilization? (I think I know the answer to that one--implication and natural decency just aren't enough for us.) It's a really interesting piece of writing, if you're into that kind of thing.