attack of the first grade virus!

i am secretly terribly clumsy. this translates sometimes to grates on my left front tire from tragic attempts at curbside parallel parking, or dents on my cell phone from daily suicide level drops, or bleach stains unfondly reminiscent of 70's era trends that creep into the elbow creases of my favorite hoodies. but mostly, it reveals itself quite omnipresently in the multitude of scars that waddle their way across my shins, knees, and left hand.
(somehow, my right hand has divorced itself from this catastrophe and remains unscathed.)
"did you get knee surgery?" a friend asked this summer, eyeing the rather nasty remnant of a gash on my right knee. no, i didn't, it's actually just a scar, and actually, i don't even remember where it came from. actually, i don't even think i know where 90% of these gatherings of collagen delight found their origins.

clumsiness may not (seemingly) logically translate to an immune system under belligerent viral occupation, not yet protected by the hague conventions of 1907 (and/or a few years of teaching), but (unseemingly), it has resulted in utter surrender from precisely october the fourth of the year of our lord two-thousand-and-nine, quite merrily to the present. i had bronchitis for five weeks. i have had the flu. i have coughed up two and a half lungs. i have had a fever. and now, it is 103am, my alarm will ring in precisely four and a half hours, and it (the military junta of viral concoctions) is at it again!
perhaps and probably it's the fact that i teach a classroom full of germy wormy squirmy six-year-old guppies, but really, it feels a bit like those mysterious gashes: where did you really come from, why are you here, and when will i learn to stop picking up used kleenexes from tables, planting little birdy kisses, and abandoning the safe ship of sanitizer and antiseptics.