By Michael Evans

     Just my luck, I suppose.  Last Saturday, I started to feel...not so good.  It was nothing serious - just a persistent cough and a general feeling of fatigue.  We've all been there before.  I figured that with a little rest and some time in bed, I'd be good as new.  By late Sunday night, however, I knew it was a little more than a garden-variety bug: chills, a fever that ran as high as 103.6, headache, and that annoying cough.  It all added up to that textbook buzzword of the season: a flu-like illness.

     Since I'd already had a seasonal flu shot earlier in the month, there were only so many guesses as to which flu-like illness I might’ve acquired.

     "Probable H1N1", my doctor pronounced Monday afternoon at conclusion of a flu evaluation.  I had, as a Department Chair at my University would later tell me (via email, of course), “caught the big one”.

     A couple of hours later, I was back home with Tamiflu and other assorted meds.   I have spent the past few days in the family bedroom.  I’d like to say I’ve done a lot of reading, writing, and engaged in a lot of profound thinking.  But I haven’t.  I have done some thinking, though or about as much thinking as a headachy, feverish, coughing, muscle-sore person could manage.  My thoughts have frequently been in reaction to what I’ve seen or heard on television recently.

     Here’s a sampling:

• Alex Trebek seems to have a pretty cushy gig the past couple decades.  He stands behind a podium, asks really smart people questions about topics and then chides them when they can’t phrase the answer-question properly.  I need a job like that.  I’m generally a know-it-all and I know I can act like a smart-ass when people don’t have the answers I do.  I would be a shoo-in. 
• It’s going to be hard to convince Maria Shriver not to violate California’s cell phone law when the FAA can’t even manage to convince a couple of pilots that they shouldn’t use their personal laptops while flying a plane.
• Why is it so difficult for Americans to realize that going on a hiking expedition in a foreign country that is even close to an Iranian or Chinese border is probably not a good idea?
• There may be one thing that will outlive even the cockroaches: Charlie Brown holiday specials.  To a Gen-Xer like me, that’s very reassuring; it gives me a sense of continuity.  God knows, the poor kid deserves to win at something for a change.  Now, if I could only figure out a way to get my kid to want to watch one of the episodes all the way through.
• And speaking of cockroaches…just when you think Levi Johnston’s 15 minutes have finally wound down, he manages to find some way to reset the clock.  Johnston now says he’s hiding ‘huge’ secrets about Sarah Palin, secrets so big that they would hurt her personally and politically.  Really?  And still, I just can’t seem to make myself care.

     At the time, some of my thoughts struck me as borderline-profound.  Seeing them in print has shown me that they are really more like an Andy Rooney segment of 60 Minutes.  Oh, well.  At least I can blame it on the fever and fatigue.