The Return of the Annual Winter Cold

{Gratuitous photo of the Zoe}

So... my annual cold has made its appearance.

It's not my favorite.

My nose is unhappy with me and every time I try to sleep, I can't breathe.

So I shall now regale you with random cold-related tales from the past while I wait for my breathing to return...

+ The first Halloween at college, everyone was all excited to dress up and go to parties or go trick-or-treating in Bel Air or hang out eating sweets at their floor's holiday party. Not in our dorm room. That Halloween, not only was I down with a cold, but my two roomies were sick as well. To make matters even more peachy, we all had midterms and papers due the next day. It was not a good Halloween in the traditional sense. It was kind of nice in the "we're all in this together need some hot water have a throat lozenge could you turn up the thermostat" kind of way.

+ When one of our high school friends got sick during our freshman year of college, he complained that this was the first time he didn't have his mom's jook {Chinese rice porridge} when he got a cold. He sounded so heartbroken. When I mentioned that I had never had jook when I was sick, he looked so horrified, it was pretty funny.

+ My parents are not super Asian, which meant that I grew up with chicken noodle soup and orange juice, sleep and cold medicine, as the solution to overcoming sickness. It wasn't until I got to college that this weird combination of hot tea and lemon, honey and herbal whatevers, was introduced to me. This one isn't really a story, just a difference in upbringing that I noticed early on and just remembered again when I told a friend I was sick yesterday. To each his own?

+ My favorite part of getting sick {if one is allowed to have a favorite part} is being able to burrow under the covers and read in bed until you get tired enough to fall asleep with the lights on. It's nice.

I think those are all the stories I can come up with right now that relate to me being ill. Oh. Wait. One more...

+ The two/three weeks leading up to college graduation, I caught a cold that just wouldn't go away. It wasn't your average runny-nose type of cold, but more the "throat so sore it hurts to swallow and if you try to talk you sound either like an eighty-year-old chain-smoker or a prepubescent boy" type of cold. Honestly, I think that is the worst kind of cold to catch right before you graduate. Because not only are there all these events and presentations and things that you have to do to close out the school year {all of which require talking to large groups of people}, but by the time you reach commencement, you can't cheer for anyone as they're walking across the stage because you've already strained your voice doing all those other things listed. It's ridiculous. Plus, it makes you super grumpy and with all the additional stress of graduating, you {or at least I} get a bit snappy and easily irritable which means you take it out on the people closest to you. Apologies to all my friends. I was not fun that last week. ): Moral of the story? Try your hardest not to get sick right before big life-changing events. ALL THE VITAMIN C.

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Okay, nowww I think that's it.