Sorry, I should have said something about being gone a few days. I didn’t have a bad reaction to the Zicam — in fact, I owe those of you who recommended it for the Kollege Kold a big wet germ-free kiss — but I did have another engagement, which in my KK misery I nearly forgot was coming.

Fortunately, I managed to pack my bag and make the other arrangements necessary to go to Chicago with the Fellows.

Yes, three days visiting the Hog Butcher to the World with my fFs. Short version: Frontera Grill, Board of Trade, Trib, Billy Goat, Art Institute, Field Museum, Miller’s Pub, architectural walking tour, architectural boating tour, visit with Alex, yadda, etc.

Longer version in a bit.

My absentee ballot arrived yesterday — one absentee ballot; I requested two — and brought me back to hometown politics. Which isn’t a pretty picture, these days. A few days back I mentioned the ridiculous caviling of the local GOP over a Democratic website that featured jokes they objected to. But it’s a quibble compared to some of the other “issues” that have emerged in this contest.

Local contests in Allen County have a long and riotous history of the pettiest sort of mudslinging, much of it generated by the party organizations, rather than the candidates themselves, to give them the old plausible-deniability thing. And when I say “party organizations” I mainly mean the Republicans, if only because the Democrats can rarely get their act together for any serious smearing, or even much of a campaign, for that matter. (There was a small dust-up a few years ago, when a liberal columnist suggested Democrats register as Republicans in the May primary, to head off at the pass a right-wing mayoral candidate. From the howling that ensued — the candidate lost, although the “crossover” factor didn’t seem to play a part — you’d think they had suggested a sister-city relationship with Josef Stalin’s Moscow.)

Anyway, now the Republican mayoral candidate is claiming her opponent, the incumbent, is soft on drugs. Why? Because two years ago, after a candidate for the police academy was turned down for telling the truth (she admitted to trying cocaine in high school), she sued the city. The city reconsidered the policy, reversed it, admitted the candidate and now? This dangerous woman works as the police department spokesman. This, the challenger’s campaign literature tells us, is “just too liberal for Fort Wayne!”

Meanwhile, every day brings news of another layoff, plant closing or other economic calamity. But this is a campaign issue. I give up.

Alex has more on the subject, and since he’s not clogged with congestion and fogged by decongestants, is far more cogent. (Scroll down past the penis cucumber; if you reach the pumpkin butt, you’ve gone too far….Just another day in Blogland.)

Public-radio pledge week sucks. It sucks for everyone. My friends in public radio say they absolutely hate it. As a listener, I hate it. A full week of begging, begging, begging, all to raise a few measly tens of thousands of dollars, to keep “Fresh Air” coming for another six months.

I used to think pledge-week hell — its eerie blend of chirpiness, cheerleading and desperation — was unique to Fort Wayne, where the public-radio demographic skews old and crabby and skinflinty. I was wrong. It’s just as bad here in public-radio paradise, a city that is its natural constituency. There’s all that relentless “two more calls before the top of the hour” knuckle-biting, hosts reduced to despair by a lack of ringing phones — everything.

The worst thing about it is this: When Christian radio, also non-commercial, needs money? They do a two-day “share-a-thon,” praise Jesus to the skies, and collect about 10 times what the NPR affiliate can shake loose in eight days.

Correction: Far more than 10 times that much. The last WBCL share-a-thon raised $1.2 million.

I don’t know what Northeast Indiana Public Radio’s goal is this time, but it was around $70,000 the last time, and I don’t think they made it, for the first time in a long time.

Every parent knows the first two or three years of your kid’s life is hell on your own, or at least on your time in sick bay. They go out into their preschools and daycares and enter a world where everyone wipes their noses with their hands and then sticks those hands where? Right into the community toy box, that’s where, and your own angel picks up those germs and brings them home to you, lucky parent.

The germ transfer happens like that, or else they use the ever-charming Sneeze Directly Into Mommy’s Face method.

Anyway, by around the year four, this has abated a bit. The kids are practicing better personal hygiene, they’ve learned to cover their noses before they sneeze, and your own immune system is finally adjusting to this little petri dish of contagion living among you. When Kate was born, I went from a cold a year to five colds a year. There was one we both had that was so bad it redefined the experience; it was a two-week, box-of-Kleenex-a-day horror show. (I should have just hung a bucket around my neck, or affixed something like an equine feed bag, and spared the landfill the mountains of tissue.) But now I’m down to two, maybe three, and they’re not so awful.

But ch-ch-ch-changes! How could I have forgotten the Kollege Kold, the dark side of 39,000 people living in close proximity to one another, sitting at the same desks, touching the same light switches, breathing all over one another in non-intimate situations? In Athens, the KK was the first thing to set my studies back in the fall. This year the sniffling arrived with first frost; young Vladimir in Russian 101 spoke of the South Quad cold. I thought it was going to get me, but it just brushed me back a little. A few early bedtimes and it left the building.

But I wouldn’t be lucky for long. I have a real KK now, a huddle-in-comforters, brew herbal tea, nod off over your homework doozy. So does Alan, although Kate, so far, has escaped. After years, I have the opportunity to give a cold back to her, although of course mommy would never do such a thing, because it just means extra work for me.

Which is the long way around to say: There may be a few link posts over the next few days, but little you’d call cogent and hard-hitting, not that there’s much of that anyway. You know what I mean. Off to the teapot.

Say you’re … OK, say you’re a man with some personal problems — a layoff, money, family splitting apart. What would you do about it? Job training, refinance your house, get therapy? No?

Oh, so you’d go over Niagara Falls just to see what would happen too, would you?

“The idea went into his head. He wanted to change the status quo. He was tired of inactivity, the recession and that kind of thing,” Ray Jones said. “Frankly, he had the idea he really could do it. He looked at the falls and said there was a way to go down there without getting hurt. I took it as just amusing. But, apparently, it did work. He discovered how to go over the falls and live, crazy as it may seem.”

…if there weren’t the occasional snickering sex story linked here, would it? Behold, the burning issue of vagina size, thoroughly explored in a respectable Manhattan newspaper.

Where is Rush spending the month, and what is it like there? Michaelangelo Signorile is on the story. Finally, some speculative fluff journalism with a little kick to it.

It occurs to me that I haven’t posted anything longer in the last few days. I haven’t kept you up to the minute with my fabulous up-to-the-minute Fellowship life.

Nothing personal. I’ve had my nose in the Russian book — I think I’m caught up, but that’s a matter of opinion — and my head in the clouds, these last few days. Yesterday I walked around campus marveling at this dense bolus of a place, so packed with facts and theses and interesting people, although all I could really do was woolgather a bit. A few weeks ago I got an e-mail inviting me to a lecture on lesbian erotica in Urdu poetry. Yesterday I confronted a tub of vegan chapstick at a coffee shop. Then I ate a hot dog. It all seemed to be part of a big seamless…seamless thing. Whatever.

I continue to be thrilled at being among so many young people. They’re so much fun, the way they blast Radiohead in their retail establishments, so loudly that you have to yell at the clerk to be heard, but who cares? My screenwriting study group meets on Monday mornings at 9 a.m., an hour that might as well be the crack of dawn for these 22-year-olds. They show up utterly bleary-eyed, looking as though they all just rolled out of bed, which I suppose they did. And yet, they know stuff, more than I knew at their age, although they know it in a different context. To them, ABBA is camp retro fun, the creative force behind “Mamma Mia.” I remember when ABBA was just a pain-in-the-ear on the radio. I consider that perhaps ABBA sounds better when the other choices on the radio are Beyonce and hip-hop, rather than late-career Led Zeppelin and the Ramones. (Am I remembering correctly? Retromania gets me so confused.)

Now it’s 10:50, time to shuffle off to class again. I’m in the computer center at the graduate library. I want to stand up and make an announcement: Please treasure every moment. It doesn’t get any better than this.

Christopher Hitchens doesn’t like Mother Teresa. After reading the usual-suspects media coverage of the beatification, it’s nice to hear a contrarian point of view.

For years, people have been telling my friend Alex, “Do what you love, and the money will follow.” This is, he’s learned, total b.s. But he’s loving his newborn blog, and I’m loving what he’s doing with it. A toast.