The end of the world?

It has not been my Best Week Ever.

Of course, it also has not been my Worst Week Ever, so there's always that.

I have acquired yet another sinus infection, which came as a surprise to even me, since I was so busy recovering from Monday's poking and prodding ("Oh look: she's super hyper-reflexive today, let's see if she keeps doing that if we keep hitting with this little hammer!") by the doctors that I didn't even recognize all the build up to the infection until my fever was raging and I was (TMI Upcoming: skip if eating) gagging on the post-nasal drip. By Wednesday, I was pretty sure that my sinus cavities had been packed as fully as they possibly could be, and by yesterday, I was seriously wondering why we ever stopped drilling holes in people's heads as a cure for things. I'm sure it would've cured what ailed me, at any rate.

Today is a slightly different story - less of the throwing up, more of the actually being able to inhale without crying, which is all for the better, in my opinion. Aside from completely missing the trash barrel 9.8 out of 10 times I threw a tissue in that general direction, I have also been reading a lot this week. The books have all been some of my past favorites, comfort reads from my personal library, which is totally my modus operandi when I'm sick: Old friends are better friends when it hurts to open your eyes and you have to roll over every 4 minutes so that whatever has infiltrated your head can slowly drip into the other side of your face. (And that's the answer I've been looking for, the one I should give when clueless people ask me why I keep all these books - "It's because something needs to keep my mind off of the fact that my brain is leaking out of my nose, ears and eyeballs, and I don't see you volunteering!")

Anyways, halfway through my second Nora Roberts trilogy yesterday, I realized that the books I was reading all seemed to have something in common: Everything I was reading had to do with the end of the world... or better yet, preventing the end of the world. Demons, vampires, gods, goddesses, ancient alien beings, epic warfare and battles filled with love and loss, blood and sacrifice. And the stories of people who are called upon to fight, even knowing that they're outnumbered, that the enemy is probably a lot stronger than them, that they might lose everything and everyone they care about.

Nothing like the end of the world to make the fact that 2/3 of the areas you use for breathing no longer function correctly seem like a minor detail.

In case you're interested, I started with her Circle trilogy, read Part I of Stephen King's It (if not my most favorite book ever, it's definitely in the top 3), and then worked my way through Nora's Blood Brothers trilogy (which is very reminiscent, at least to me, of It). I was going to read the fabulous post-apocalyptic Life as we knew it by Susan Beth Pfieffer next, but I'm still waiting for a copy of the sequel, so I think I'll see if I can't find some other sort of literary mayhem that appeals to me.