When you are sick, your comfort food is

I've almost completely lost my voice, but that of course should stand as no impediment to the dissemination of knowledge, which is my primary goal. So I got miked and gave my lecture in a husky "late night radio DJ" voice.

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

When you are sick, your comfort food is:

Soup, in increasing order of specificity:

• soup
• noodle soup
• ramen
• chicken noodle soup
• chicken noodle soup heavy on the noodles
• chicken noodle soup and ginger ale
• 
  

Other starches or sugary foods:

• bread
• crackers
• triangle toast
• cinnamon sugar toast + apple cinnamon tea
• cookie dough
• jello
• Skittles

Outliers:

• ginger
• beef rice pudding
• congee
• water with lemon juice and pulp
• water
• tofu

The most extreme outlier is "hot toddies" --- someone's family has adopted the same "use alcohol to burn out the germs" approach that I've heard bandied around by half-joking grandparents.

This post's theme word is leechdom (noun), "a remedy or medicine." What a wondrous panoply of leechdoms!

Your favorite childhood memory, in one sentence:

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

Your favorite childhood memory, in one sentence:

Certain students obeyed the structure of the question, replying with a complete sentence:

• 4 kids make a mess in a muddy backyard.
• Carrier has arrived.
• Summer Camp is awesome!
• That's personal!
• I ate a banana
• I was bad at softball
• A TV gave me a concussion
• oh god why are there so many ferrets

Others only left sentence fragments, abandoned noun or verb phrases left dangling, their tenuous wisps reaching back into memory:

• climbing trees
• soccer games
• breaking my femur
• summer with grandparents
• going on field trips
• playing
• figuring out how to use a water fountain
• vacation in Thailand
• infantile amnesia
• video games
• [illustration of a ghost chasing pacman eating dots]
• corner
• go karting
• spending time with family
• playing with dogs
• scoring winning soccer goal
• going to beach
• carefree summers

My cold, robotic, grown-up professor grinch heart is warmed by these snippets of lives happily remembered. I'm curious about why "breaking my femur" would be one's favorite childhood memory, but I suppose context counts for quite a bit in comparing memories...


This post's theme word is defervescence, "the abatement of a fever." I vividly remember being sick in childhood, but the gradual defervescence left no distinct impression.