Of Blocked Air Passages and General Bad Luck

So the past few days have been spent in general misery because of a cold. You know the general progression: from sneezing once while eating dinner out with old friends, to an asshole bug building a blockade of snot inside your sinuses. The situation disintegrates at the point when you can’t breathe from one or two nostrils. (If you had a choice between having a blocked nostril and having blocked nostrils, which would you choose? Personally, having just one blocked annoys me, though having two blocked reduces me to a mouth breather which needless to say, leaves much to be desired.)

To top it all off, your eyes water and your head feels like it has grown to planetary proportions. Your body demands a horizontal position; ironically, you can’t breathe when lying flat. Working through a cold (through your body’s threats of a lie-down strike) is misery with spiked cleats on.

When you can’t breathe at all through these nifty breathing apparatus, you’re either a. praying for death, as long as it is swift and comes in a hazmat suit, or b. declaring war with the bug by bombarding it with a wide spectrum of drugs. The B option sometimes spirals down to the bug fighting dirty, literally. It sends rivers of mucous down your still-blocked nostrils, and depending on how good a shape your immune system is in, this may continue for a good few rolls of tissue paper.

However debilitating the cold may be, you manage through it. You do your normal stuff: work, work, and bidding for watches on eBay. One such bid you placed is ending in 8 hours, and you haven’t slept yet. You instruct 3 different people to give you a wake up call an hour before bidding ends. You get 4 hours of sleep because of the cold, and bid again. The bids are up to 2015 pesos, and you’ve placed the highest bid 30minutes before the auction expires. You sit in a catatonic state at your desk and refresh the page a minute too late. A random douche has placed a higher bid, winning the auction and the watch.

You sit in disgust at yourself, at the random douchebag Bidder 15, and at the universe at large. You use all of your Google-fu to find the same watch from other online stores who either do not have the watch stocked anymore or do not ship to the good old Philippines. You use different keywords, exhaust all possible search techniques. You end up at with a cell phone number of a person offering the same watch at a cheaper price. You try your hand at haggling and end up with a 25% markdown.

At the end of the day, you still have a stuffy nose running rivulets of contagious material, you still have a massive headache, and you still want to lie down and fervently wish for clear airways. But for the life of you, you’re still happy.

PS. Dear Decolgen No-Drowse, SINUNGALING!

PSS. Dear Bidder 15, buti na lang. Bwahahahahahaha.