When you wake up with a space heater for a torso and feeling like a troll is pruning his favorite thorn bushes in your throat, you have some choices to make. Keep sleeping or get up and start working? Coddle yourself or power through? Make do with advil or shuffle down to the drugstore for theraflu? It's hard to make choices when you're sick, so it seems unfair that you suddenly have so many of them. Your IQ drops a solid 30 points and stringing together enough verbs and nouns to make a recognizable sentence becomes difficult. Grave self doubt sets in.

"I'm pretty sure I'm smart enough to operate this can opener, but...maybe not? Because this can isn't opening. What am I doing wrong? What else can't I do? FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT'S HOLY, I JUST WANT SOME DAMN SOUP." Then your roommate finds you in the kitchen, still in your bathrobe at 4 p.m., hair sticking up in all directions, banging on a can of soup with a screwdriver.

It wasn't my finest moment.

When you're sick, you look at your choices and beeline straight toward the one that makes the least sense. Like wandering the aisles of Trader Joe's in a feverish haze, staring in confusion at the place where the chicken noodle soup should be and isn't because Trader Joe's is quirky and lovable and sometimes they just don't have the things you need when you need them. So you come home with latkes and frozen naan instead.

The upside of being sick is the sleeping. All the glorious sleeping. Catching up on the sleeping you haven't been doing because you tell yourself you have so many other things to do. But now you don't. Because you have an excuse to cull your list to the bare minimum, ruthlessly slashing things like gym-going and dish-doing and work-finishing and personal hygiene until all it says is "drink orange juice," "sleep a lot," and "watch Ryan Gosling do things on your laptop screen."