At this point in every academic year I perform the same morbid ritual of starting to count how many classes remain until freedom and then quietly weep when the first digit is a 4. Usually this is the season of attrition, because the weather is terrible, it gets dark at 4 in the afternoon, the lectures feel longer, the weeks feel shorter, and my students show the conversational energy of ornamental houseplants. This year, however, something odd has happened. My body has been experiencing a fit of creative writing of its own since last November, and has taken to sending me daily mixed signals that make me briefly wonder whether I should be revising my lecture slides or my will. To complicate things we have the fact that it’s literally a roulette of symptoms, each one cheerfully unhelpful, like a doctor who only communicates via riddles. So, against all reasonable expectation, teaching has become the steadiest thing in my life. My timetable, the classrooms, the brain-numbing slides, even ...