50 Ways to Spend Your Sick Day

It's flu season again, and if the past several months of news stories are any indication, we're headed for a doozy. Over the next few weeks, your fellow students are going to start dropping off the daily roll-call like flies. Don't be surprised to see your teachers sterilize their classrooms like they're covering up a crime scene.

Chances are you might be one of the unlucky few to come down with the most recent strain. If you do succumb, how will you spend those free hours at home? You need to have a game plan in place to ensure you get the most from your free day (whether or not you truly have a legit illness is beside the point). To help you out, we humbly offer our top 50 favorite sick day activities:

1. Toast for breakfast, toast for lunch, and an entire bottle of 7-Up for dinner. Actually being sick kind of sucks.

2. Start working on your Halloween costume.

3. Watch The Princess Bride for eight hours straight, reciting the dialogue along the way.

4. Become an expert at reading the oral thermometer.

5. Reread all the books you read on your 4^th grade sick days. Charlotte’s Web will seem totally different to you now.

6. Beat the Facility in 55 seconds on 00 Agent difficulty.

7. Learn to knit.

8. If you haven’t been following it, brush up on the last several years of international news.

9. Learn to ride the unicycle.

10. Mimic your cat by curling up in front of a heating vent for six hours.

11. Practice some funny voices to be used in future social situations.

12. Wear a Slanket.

13. Cut the eyes out of old yearbook photographs.

14. Search online for complete seasons of TV shows you’ve never seen before. Watch one.

15. Work ahead an entire week in all of your textbooks (if you’re into that).

16. Floss.

17. Don’t floss because the flu has made it feel like all your teeth are falling out.

18. Quit putting it off and write up your holiday gift list.

19. Watch European soccer or rugby with the volume off and provide your own play-by-play commentary.

20. Watch news reports in a language you don't speak. Who knows, you might have the secret ability to understand Arabic.

21. Play an entire game of Monopoly by yourself.

22. Groom your pets.

23. Play an entire game of Hide-And-Seek by yourself.

24. Make sure your Facebook/MySpace profile is 100% up to date. Is Alicia Keys still one of your favorite artists?

25. Teach yourself ventriloquism using a hand puppet made from an old sweater.

26. Watch this super creepy music video over and over.

27. Make the first comment on every Sparklife post because everyone else is in school. Suckers.

28. Daydream about what it would be like to travel forward in time to a world run by super-intelligent apes.

29. Watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

30. Consider what you would do if you could actually hack into your school’s attendance records.

31. Narrate everything you do to an invisible audience of strangers.

32. Practice squaring very large numbers in your head.

33. Have weird, scary fever dreams where you are being chased by angry triangles.

34. Drink plenty of fluids.

35. Practice writing with your non-dominant hand.

36. See whether you have telekinesis by trying really hard to move a pencil with your mind.

37. Build a blanket cocoon. Imagine that you are morphing into a moth.

38. Make a list of all the four-syllable words you can think of off the top of your head.

39. Alphabetize that list.

40. Cut your own hair (here are some instructional videos).

41. Beat the Aztec Temple in 1:56?!? No way, you're cheating!

42. Clear out the text message inbox on your phone. (This is just a good thing to do from time to time. It’s a huge pain if it fills up.)

43. Drag out a world atlas and figure out all the other countries you might want to live in.

44. Wash your hands.

45. Make elaborate charts explaining the story arc of LOST to friends who don’t watch the show.

46. Learn to speak with a convincing foreign accent.

47. If you’ve got the chills, read the Inferno. If you’re feverishly warm, read Call of the Wild.

48. Discover the best of what YouTube has to offer.

49. Make a paper mache mask of a dragon (here are some instructions).

50. If you’re just pretend sick, decide what symptoms you’ll be exhibiting over the next 24 hours.

Got your own set of favorite sick day activities? Add to our list in the comments.

Related Post: Stay Home from School to Save Your Sanity