Miserable

A salty, slow stream of water leaked from her right eye, across the bridge of her nose, and landed with an unsatisfying “pat” on the sheet. She pressed a fresh tissue against her tear duct, willing the watering to stop while cursing the sneeze that had just chickened out.

More...

She hated being ill. Even with a cold, her mental faculties were severely diminished and her energy was nil. It didn’t help much that her right eye, being the only one that seemed compelled to water, was slowly swelling shut. Her eyelids had always been sensitive to tears, swelling to shiny flaps of flesh at the first minor wet sob. It was one of the primary reasons she hated to cry.

“AAHHH-CHOOO!”

Ah, there was the sneeze. She tried to blow her nose. Naught but dry air came from her left nostril and nothing at all budged from her right. The tickling in that nostril was maddening, though. She tore a piece of tissue, twisted it, and shoved it into the stubbornly clogged airway. There. Maybe that would stop all the mucousy creeping. Maybe now the sneezing would stop.

“How is it that when I am at work, all I want to do is lay around, but when I am confined to laying around, all I want to do is get some work done?” she thought to herself. In her fifth year of a PhD program, she was all too familiar with the customary grad-student guilt, which meant that any time a student was not working, she felt she should be. This phenomenon extended to time spent at friendly gatherings, Friday-night movies, even the few stolen minutes a night when a bit of knitting or drawing could be done. The grad student guilt made free time all but miserable. At least grad students who made it through the program walked away with not only an advanced degree, but also a very important life skill: the ability to completely disregard that nagging, cruel little voice that brings a conscious mind back to work thoughts. At this point in her graduate career, though, she was still struggling with mastery of this very crucial skill.