I am ill.

This disease shit used to be fun back when I was in grade school and being sick meant I could stay in bed all day, watching TV and playing Nintendo, with Mom waiting on me hand and foot. Catching a cold was the best thing that could happen to you, unless it happened over Christmas break or on a snow day or something, or you were one of those freak kids who was trying for the perfect attendance award. Too bad as a grown-up, my sick days don't get as much sympathy. I have to make my own chicken broth and get my own boxes of tissues, and my bitching about how much my throat hurts falls on deaf ears.

But thank God we've got the internet, so now the hypochondriac in me can easily research all the ways in which this nominal cold could theoretically kill me. I don't know how I lived without knowing this could be strep throat that could eventually lead to rheumatic fever. Oh, yeah, I lived blissfully.