Long in the tooth and short on wisdom

From the ground floor to the English department, there are 76 stairs; in Sturm Hall, there are 66; in my house, there are six stairs up and seven down, three and five in the front; each landing of stairs at my parent's house is six.  OCD is a lovely thing.  If I'm walking the dog around the park at Northglenn High School, it takes an average of 810 steps, depending on my stride.  I actually figured out the average.  I count every calorie out and every calorie in, every day.  I remember my phone number from when I lived in West Virginia, which has been 24 years this summer - it's 304-599-8612.  If I typed slower, I could count my keystrokes on my computer.  The fact that I'm getting older and my memory slips occasionally these days only makes the problem of counting things worse and makes me want to write it down.  One of my students was telling me about her crazy grandfather who, when he retired, was so bored that he kept track of the construction across the street and actually calculated the estimated square footage of the building by tracking how many cement trucks it used to lay the foundation and how deep it must be.  I laughed, but I would do that.  I have done something like it, and more than once.  

It's Saturday and I'm certain I'm sick.  Yesterday I came home from from afternoon class and had to keep going because there were pressing matters, but by the time I actually got home long enough to rest, I realized that my whole body ached and that I was so tired that holding the remote for the television was a chore.  Not to mention that part of the satellite cable is out - God love Direct TV - and I had to sit on the phone with a too cheerful (and certainly fake) customer service worker bee who clearly engages with total idiots on the phone all day.  I do pity her, but the script these folks have to follow in order to begin actually helping you with your cable problem is utterly insulting.  I know several people who have held this job, and I have to say that given what I know, I am straining to be as polite as possible to these grossly underpaid and abused folk, despite my growing irritation at being instructed where said keys on my remote are located.  Guh.  This is only necessary, of course, because there are people who call in and have to be instructed what a remote control IS in the first place; it's like the warnings on take-away cups of coffee that warn you the contents may be hot, or the label on the hair dryer that instructs you not to use whilst in the bathtub.  These things exist because some fool along the way claimed not to know these things.  If you need proof that the shallow end of the gene pool is breeding faster than should be permitted, there you are. 

In any case, some of my students this term are driving me utterly insane as well, and I originally thought this was the reason for my listlessness - that I have to work so hard to not kill people, and that I'm constantly battling with a few students in a really active class that is three hours long - but it turns out I've caught some nasty bug-type thing.  I desperately wanted to go out and listen to my good friend Charly read his fiction, but it began at seven, and I was in bed asleep at 6:15.  I got up for about an hour at ten to finish watching a movie from Netflix that has been sitting on my bookshelf for months, and then went back to bed.  Got up this morning to go to the gym and realized that putting on my sneakers had made me sleepy and figured it wasn't worth the bother.  It probably won't prevent me from trying again later today, but for now I'm lying low.