The Depressing Snot Parade

(It must be bodily functions week here at Why I Hate Everybody… check out this)

I don't know about you, but I don't usually just wake up sick. I remember when I was a kid, I would go to bed feeling fine, but then I would just wake up, out of the blue, at about 2 AM, slowly sit up and then vomit vociferously all over the place. 

Seconds later, because of some weird barf based sixth-sense that mothers are blessed(?) with, my mom would burst into the room and help me into the bathroom, while my dad was left with the task of cleaning up. No easy feat because vomiting from the top bunk has the same basic effect as filling a bucket with pink paint and three day old sushi and then just spinning around in circles until every surface is gratuitiously coated.

But as I got older, and moved from the top bunk, to the bottom bunk, to a bigger bed, back to the top bunk briefly when I was afraid of being attacked by fiddler crabs, and then back to a bigger bed, my illnesses started coming on more gradually.

For me, the sore throat is the horseman of my well-being's apocalypse. As soon as I feel the dreaded nasal-drip-pain I drop into panic mode. 

It starts rationally enough with me drinking some tea and taking Vitamin C, but as the soreness begins to radiate I start resorting to more and more outlandish remedies, up until the point that, even though I have been dipping ALL my candy canes in strawberry vodka and oreos, I officially have a cold. Observe:

Yup... even the lamp is against me.

At that point I begin to flip between a pitiful, injured animal skulking around waiting to be petted and a rage filled heroin addict who blames society for making me feel this bad.

It is amazing to me how, when you're not sick, you forget how UNBELIEVEABLY AWUFL (see… writing while sick results in misspellings… it also results in leaving those misspellings unfixed and commenting on them instead) you feel when you ARE sick. 

Maybe it is some sort of defense mechanism… like how the brain can forget traumatic events from the past, your brain just makes you forget why you woke up with an entire box worth of used kleenex scattered about you like some horrible snowfall.

That selective memory, however, can result in this:

Tra-la-la, I'm feeling fine but I've been working a lot lately. Wouldn't it be nice if I got a cold and could stay inside in my jammies all day drinking tea? Hell yeah! I hope I get sick! Where is there a public handrail I can lick!? THIS is happening! FUCK YEAH! TEA!!! I love tea!!

Poor deluded fool.

When you do get sick, all that romanticized lounging on the couch wearing a sweatshirt and watching daytime television is replaced with DEAR LORD! THIS IS IT! I'M DEFINITELY DYING THIS TIME! 

Why would my nose be oozing and my brain feel like it has eaten a lot of halloween candy and suddenly can't fit into its skinny jeans, and by "skinny jeans" I mean my own throbbing SKULL, if I weren't, actively, dying right this God damn second? To quote the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become an oozing pile of self-pity, destroyer of worlds!"

… at least I think that's how it goes.

The pain traipses along from throat, to brain, to nose, to feet (for some reason), has a brief vacation in the stomach and then just kinda explodes and goes everywhere.

Life becomes very black and white when I have a cold. For example: everyone that ever liked me, doesn't any more; everything that I ever liked; suddenly doesn't like me back; everything tastes like soda bread...

Eventually I do get better from the cold and life returns to normal. But then the old selective memory comes blasting back like a rocket car on the salt flats! After this cold I will forget how bad I feel right now! As of this moment I am pretty sure I am actually being chewed apart from the inside by an army of invisible, radioactive super ants… 

Therefore, when the girlfriend suggests going out for coffee I scream "how can you even think of suggesting I leave the bedroom! Even thinking about thinking about leaving the bedroom makes me sicker!!!"

But the next time she gets sick, I won't be able to understand why on earth some stupid cold would make her NOT want to get drunk and play midnight-outdoor-winter-badmitten? It's just a little cold! You're FINE!