Cold Sores

So, yeah, I'm sick with a cold. Qu'elle surprise.

I find this highly significant because, heretofore, I had spent all winter boosting my weak-as-wet-cardboard immune system with more fruit than usual. Because you must ask, and because I must tell you, I overcame my aversion to mandarines and discovered the usefulness of apples as a quick breakfast snack - notwithstanding the fact that, more often than not, these apples will be the only thing I have eaten until dinner (poverino, &c).

Sure, it had been going around - last year, there was some sort of pandemic in August (exams were in November) at my alma mater that I may or may not have inadvertently caused - but I felt pretty secure this time around. Sure, my dear, dear brother had it - and still does - but, au contraire to what I told at least one acquaintance - it was not really his fault. (Ah, qu'elle poseur!)

I'm a man undone by stress.

This time, the stress was due to the "peeps" at RMIT (I'm refraining from using a more defamatory word) telling me certain things that I really didn't want to hear. That, and the fact I was getting screwed over by technology again - tehnologija, as my Croatian grandfather says. 

So, as Lenin wrote in what was almost certainly another context, what is to be done?

Well, I base my recovery (it's fairly scientific) on a few principles:

• Staying warm: That means wearing an absurd amount of layers plus a ridiculously-long scarf in the hope of inducing sweat, which apparently quickens recovery. That also means having a little nightcap just before bedtime. However, I'm not talking about beer, which is only 4-5%. No, you need to have the heavy stuff, so you get to sleep fairly, plus have funky Technicolor© dreams at the same time.  It is fairly inauspicious, then, that I have A Panic at the Disco's album "A Fever You Can't Sweat Out". Maybe it works as some sort of reverse omen. Who knows?
• Eating a, frankly, absurd diet: I mentioned fruit above, but this is just half part of the plan. The other half relates to eating the most fattening, unhealthy food possible. Examples are chocolate, take-away and others. It goes beyond, y'know, becoming obese, because what happens during a cold is you generally tend to eat less - because, y'know, you feel like what second US President John Adams would have described (in another context) as a "crapulous mass" - and so you lose a bit of mass. The important thing during a cold is to dramatically increase the calorie-to-exercise ratio - by dramatically increasing the amount of calories.
• Taking medication: This may sound obvious... and it is! Go, go, go on the paracetamol or ibuprofen. Of course as a maximum, you only really need to pop those pills twice a day. I find having paracetamol in a tea (Lemsip &c, with honey and lemon naturellement) in the morning one day and a pill the other varies things up a little (or tea morning, pill lunch &c). (Authorial note: The didact is getting too strong even for me).

There are some positives:

• Being a drain on the system: Basically, with colds men - and me as well - can use this debilitating illness as an excuse for the indolence that they already possess. Do the dishes? Nope, sorry. Cook tea? Don't want to make everybody sick. Do work? I'd rather curl up in front of the telly, thanks (the worst is during the day, when all you get is Ready Steady Cook and movies from when you didn't know they were able to make them). You also are able to moan constantly without being called out on it. The only other time in which it would be acceptable would be singing a Bob Dylan song. 
• Facial hair growth rate slows down: Notwithstanding my ever-diminishing masculinity, the fact that it takes slightly longer to get the point where I resemble a metrosexual caveman pleases me no end (puberty hasn't hit me yet, folks). 

So, yeah. That's my narcissistic contribution in the best Montaignean tradition for today. There's an odds-on chance this cold will prove to be an extremely virulent strain of, like, swine flu or it could turn out to be completely harmless.

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There is something deliciously ironic in the fact that, while completely healthy, I am too lazy to actually so I do the whole spam email thing, but with this cold I get this whole artistic (that really should be in quotation marks) inspiration thing and type out a thesis on paracetamol. C'est la vie.