The one good thing about the cold that would not leave is that I seem to have lost some weight in the last week and a half. Yesterday I tried putting on a pair of pants I bought a couple of weeks ago. When I bought them, they fit like they were made for me, draped beautifully. Perfect pants � the holy grail of shopping. Now I can take them off without unbuttoning them. I should be happy, but they were the perfect pants. I had found the impossible. Now all I can hope for is that they�ll shrink in the wash.

It�s odd because I don�t really look or feel any thinner. Of course, my self-image may have been seriously skewed by the capriciousness of our bathroom scale. It actually coughed out springs a few months ago. Since then, its weights are extremely arbitrary. 112 one day, 190 the next. And yet I can�t stop stepping on it every morning. It�s as if I can�t start the day without the useless information it gives me, as if some secret to a successful day lies encoded in its randomness. I used to have a similarly inexplicable fetish for reading the daily horoscopes in my office�s copy of the Sun-Times each morning. The habitual consumption of useless information seems to be a fundamental part of my personality. And it�s no doubt the reason I�m in academia.

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