Thursday, January 10, 2002

Buh

The head cold that I developed as a souvenir of my holiday trip to London persists, despite the fact that I awake each morning feeling twenty times refreshed. I have come to think of it as the disease equivalent of those trick birthday cake candles, the sort you blow out only to have reignite a moment later.

The past week has followed more or less the same pattern. I get out of bed, assure myself that I can breathe freely and that my cough has subsided to a mere tickling in the throat. An hour or two later, I'm at the office with a hacking that sounds like a garbage disposal with a pitchfork jammed into it and a case of post-nasal drip that might be more accurately described as "post-modern drip", since it doe little more than call attention to itself without really amounting to anything. By noon, my body aches so badly that I move around the theatre with the alacrity of an arthritic African elephant.

At various co-workers' suggestions, I have ingested zinc, Vitamin C, echinacea and Tylenol Cold caplets on a regular basis. Tonight, I am considering the possibility of mainlining Nyquil before I go to bed.

If I should die before I wake, I would like to posthumously place in nomination the person who invented the process of putting lotion in tissues for a MacArthur "genius grant". Those remarkable paper products, along with Hostess chocolate cupcakes and saucy conversations with sassy boys, are the only things to have made the last couple of days at all bearable.