I’ve been spoiled in the jobs I’ve had for the last ten years. If nothing else, my decade-string of low-ceiling jobs has kept me isolated from the general public. It also kept me in small offices staffed by low numbers of young single nerdy males with no family. I haven’t been prone to catch so much as a head cold for as far back as I can remember. Even when the roommates would come home with one ailment or another (and they always do, for almost the entire winter and half of the non-winter), I seem to dodge every one of those germy bullets.

Then I came to hair school.

This fall I’ve been watching one student after another come down with a flu and go home for the day. A dozen of them at a time. We’ve had a couple of H1N1 incidents as well… the dreaded “Swine Flu!” Oh No! Not the Swine Flu! I haven’t caught any swine flu’s (that’s the plural of “flu” isn’t it? “Flus” looks wrong, and “flues” even moreso), but I did get a “something.”

I got my “something” a couple weeks ago. I even called-out that day. Had a sore head, a sore body, and a nasty cough. The worst of it only lasted one day, but the cough stayed with me. I have it today even, as I’m typing this. A nagging, dry cough that makes my head hurt as the day progresses. I take a cough drop, which helps a little, then in another hour or two the cough is back.

I didn’t quit smoking this spring just so that I could spend the very next winter with a persistent cough! Don’t my lungs deserve a parole?

In school with some 60 women. Women with kids, kids who catch every ailment known to man, and then give it to every other kid, who then brings it home to his mama. Said mama then goes to her hair school and gives it to every other mama, who then bring it back home to their kids, who have already caught other flu’s, and then the whole mosh pit of different flu germs gets together and forms a gang of super germs. Super germs that lift weights and learn Karate, then go back out to that afforementioned hair school and climb into the system of one student blogger and make him cough for two weeks and counting!

I’m going to have to get my immune system some karate lessons. So nice and safe in its previous neighborhood, but we’ve moved out of THAT neighborhood. Now we’ve moved into the germy ghetto, and it’s rough out there. My immune system is like Ralph Macchio, and needs a Mister Miyagi to get it in shape. Unfortunately, I think the “Miyagi” in this scenario consists of getting beaten up on a regular basis by Cobra Kai, get my immune system all toughened up. Then it’ll come back and beat the snot out of every Cobra Kai, and bang Elizabeth Shue in the back of his old school Miyagi’mobile.