I was all ready this week to throw down the gauntlet (not the Boot Camp gauntlet, but an entirely new, hand-woven gauntlet) and present Terribly Happy's guide to finding True Love.

But that's going to have to wait until next week.

I'm sick. I stayed home from work. I'm very sick.

Is this show what got me sick?

It started Monday night. Right before I went to bed, I started to get that weird tickle in my throat and swallowing began to feel thick and unnatural. I attributed that slight nausea to the HBO Undercover show, "Living Dolls," which is all about beauty pageants for little girls. It's incredibly creepy, even when they only mention Jon Benet Ramsey once through the entire show. Seeing how hard these parents drive their kids and the gaudiness of the pageant themselves... man. If you have HBO, watch it. It's fascinating and disturbing: But what was most disturbing to me, personally, was that after an hour and a half of watching this, it didn't seem so awful. It didn't seem that far removed from parents who push their kids into athletics or music. Yes, we may find beauty pageants distasteful, but the physical and psychological rigors and competition aren't all that different.

I went to bed and when I woke up, I had an awful sore throat. I had been waking up in the wee hours, and when I finally got up for good, I kept having to spit phlegm in the sink. After a half hour of this, I decided I wasn't up for going to work.

Or was it the smarmy Mel Gibson that got me so ill?

So I stayed home. Bored. All day. Sleeping, trying to eat, watching the God-awful What Women Want with Mel Gibson. That movie was so incredibly bad. Not funny. Not charming. Helen Hunt playing the same character she plays in every movie. Six Sinatra songs (some played more than once). I think the movie made me relapse just when I was starting to feel better.

I feel so incredibly helpless when I'm sick like this. I wanted to go to the gym. I couldn't. I had stuff to do at work. I couldn't go. I wanted to drink stuff. I ended up sipping on orange juice and water all day. When I finally took a nap, I woke up with an awful headache that still hasn't subsided.

And now I'm worried because I'm leaving for L.A. on Thursday and I don't want to travel sick. I'm hoping it'll just go away. I mean, it had to. I've gone through nearly a whole box of Kleenex. How much more phlegm can I have in me? Isn't there a limit? How many cubic centimeters?

I didn't leave the house all day. I didn't listen to music or read or do much for pleasure. Instead, I watched lots of bad TV. (Have you seen "The Fighting Fitzgeralds?" Don't.)

And now I don't even have the energy to be entertaining. Pity me.

It's not like I don't get sick. But it still always surprises me when I do. As if I have some sort of glowing immunity to germs. I'm not sloppy or slovenly, so that should count for something. I don't eat obviously diseased meat. I don't share drinks with people at the hospital. I don't inject myself with random anthrax strains to see what will happen.

Being sick always reminds me of how I take my health and my energy for granted. Of how horrible it would be to be house-bound, or to be sick the point that I couldn't live a normal life. Just staying home for one day is enough to drive me crazy.

And then, later in the evening, I watched that Emma Thompson movie (based on the award-winning play, I know, I know) W;t. It's about a woman with terminal cancer and her fight to retain her dignity and her intelligence through some intensive chemotherapy.

There she is, lying in bed, moaning in pain, losing all the physical parts of herself. And there I am, in bed watching it, with my box of Crunch & Munch and all of a sudden I feel pretty guilty to whining about a little cold.

So It's not so bad. I'll feel better tomorrow. And I'll have fun in L.A.

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Right. L.A. So, I won't be updating until early next week, unfortunately. But when I return, I hope to have all kinds of pictures, stories and adventures to tell. See you then.