Young at Heart, Not in Ear

One of those weeks:

Sunday -- filing cracked and came out while chewing gum
Monday -- birthday
Wednesday -- car towed

I know things could be worse, but my teeth and car are my greatest sources of anxiety. They're the things I always dream about breaking down on me at the worst time. And I always felt turning 34 was when I got old.

Oh yeah, don't forget the cold. Day 15 -- still hacking and sniffling.

And then today, I discover this:

Teens Turn 'Repeller' into Adult-Proof Ringtone

I'd heard about the 'Repeller' noise. Funny the way teens turned it around. What depresses me: the NPR page contains a link to an audio file of the sound. So I downloaded it, played it... and heard nothing.

Health Notes

Aftermath of cold still lingering. Took the afternoon off Monday. Have felt functional since then and increasingly better, but still a scratch in my throat and running sinuses.

Filling fell out last night. Earlier in the week, I lost my nightguard in my sleep after dreaming that it was falling apart in my mouth and I was picking pieces out from between my teeth and pulling strands up out of my throat. I suspect the loss of the mouthpiece was a subconscious reponse to subtle discomfort or anxiety about my teeth, rather than the cause of the loss filling.

More and more, it feels like a losing battle against chaos.

First Cold of Year

I was reflecting on Friday how I haven't missed a day of work since I left university over a year ago. The question was raised in my mind by the fact that I felt like I might have had that day a reasonable excuse for missing work, or would soon, as I was in the first day of a new cold.

It started Thursday afternoon with the slightest itch in my throat. I noticed it around 3pm. I wonder now if it can't be attributed to a woman who, sitting next to me in a restaurant at lunch that day, I noticed coughed quite publicly without the least effort to suppress the broadcast just before I left. At the time I thought, "What a disgusting pig!" Now I'm thinking, "That disgusting pig gave me a cold!" All correlation and the loosest causation. Would the contagion of a single cough register that quickly?

I take colds as one of the little miseries we must put up with from time to time. I do my best to space them out as widely as possible and so the meditation on missed work days served as my indirect method for trying to figure out when I was last afflicted. I suspect I have had at least one minor cold during this period in which I simply came to work. (It has always been my philosophy that, if you are going to be sick and miserable, what better place to while away the duration than work.)

This cold doesn't seem too bad. Thursday and Friday nights were uncomfortable and I awoke with a parched throat. Yesterday my immune system began its campaign to take back my throat and nasal passageways in earnest and was more uncomfortable. My head now aches dully, too. Usually, it takes a day or two to settle in, then a day or two of greater discomfort as the alien invasion is fought off, and then a week or so of wretched hacking and sneezing as the casualties and damage is cleaned up.