Nudge nudge, cough cough

“The reports of my death have been greatly overrated,” Mark Twain once famously wrote.  Indeed, despite comments such as Tim Molesworth’s “You look like death” and Tritty’s “You sound like crap”, I’m finally well enough to sit upright and return to this (unfortunately neglected) blog.

Apparently, it’s some combination of bronchitis and a secondary infection/virus.  Despite Tim’s quizzical claim that bronchitis “is a nineteenth-century disease, right?”, ‘the bronk’, as I affectionately like to call it, seems to have infected a sizeable proportion of Canberra.  Perhaps I’m not the only one who lives in a draughty garage after all?

According to the Doc, my body was valiantly holding out until after the GRE exam, which meant the infection finally blew out (and thus rendered me at my most contagious) over the Victorian Open long weekend.  Apologies to all the participants who may have contracted my lack of ebullience, including international master Igor Goldenberg, who assured me that at his age, bronchitis was a far more serious threat than losing 20 rating points.

At first I thought the timing couldn’t be worse – a week where I have a three-day, FIDE-rated tournament and then have to move house is hardly the time to be metaphorically licking one’s infected wounds – but it’s surely a better result than sitting the exam at half strength.  Not that I feel anywhere near half strength at the moment, mind you.  I’d settle for thirty percent right now.

A fortnight off work is just a little bit too long, and, perhaps rebounding against the insanity of GRE study before this, boredom has started to set in.  This is compounded by the facts that the new place currently has no internet, and that I’m too drugged out in the evenings on enough antibiotics to comatose a small hippo.  To compensate, I’m watching highlights on the various world news services on SBS.  If nothing else, I’m hoping the bronk might help me pick up a few words in Arabic.

Unbelievably, barely any of the 600 new words I learned before the exam came up.  Quite depressing, and in fact my score for the verbal section was below expectations.  I refuse to be contrite or lugubrious about my vocab efforts, however; I feel far more erudite than I’ve ever been before, and various social experiments have showed that it is now easier than ever for me to drive away annoying conversationalists at parties, simply by listing useless language ad nauseum. 

I am of course a bit disappointed by the score, but hopefully most economics departments don’t care too much for grandiloquence. And besides, despite a mid-exam panic attack, the maths section turned out alright.  I’ll find out the essay scores in a week or so, and will dutifully report back.

Finally, I feel I should in all fairness report that Tim claims he knew all of the words on my previously posted list.  And he did, along with Tristram, help me move house while I was effectively a dead fish walking.  However, Tim still claims that bronchitis is basically extinct, so I’m not sure how much we can read into that.

By the way, anyone seen Karma lately?!