What goes around

It's that time of the year again, when everyone is sick and germs are being passed around like a joint at a Grateful Dead concert.

First it was my boyfriend with the runny nose and itchy eyes. His ailing turned into a dreadful sinus infection that, to my understanding, was comparable to someone banging a hammer on your eye lids.

Next, one of my roommates sends me a text late at night that reads "do i need to do anything drastic if i have a 102 fever?" I thought this was worthy of an in-person response, so I walked down the hall to her bedroom (where she texted me from) and found her, miserable, in bed and shaking. After bringing her a glass of water, I took a multivitamin and passed out.

Wadaya know, but I wake up coughing and sneezing. I down three glasses of Emergen-C at work, take some more vitamins, drink a lot of tea and one or two hot tottie's, and I still come down with a nasty cold that causes me to stay home from work the next day.

A week later, I'm not entirely better - still blowing my nose every so often, which if you know me sounds like a foghorn or kazoo. And to make matters worse, I've seemingly passed it on to my other roommate and my officemate. AND my other, other roommate has contracted an ear infection. WTF, germs?

Since all of us seem to have slightly different illnesses, I want to know where this sickness is coming from. If not from each other, then from the dirty bus rails? The utensils that don't get get a clean enough douse in our dishwasher? The exchange of dollar bills? Even if you use hand sanitizer like an OCD maniac, I guarantee you, you will fall ill with one thing or another some time between January 1 and March 31. It's the winter cold that we all dread every year.

Flu shots don't seem to help. Vitamins don't do shit, apparently. And even if Emergen-C is supposed to work better than the recently recalled airborne, it still doesn't do anything once you're already sick. When will we find a cure to the common cold? My uncle seems to think that smoking half a joint helps. My co-worker swears on some ginger-cayenne pepper-lemon-hot water concoction. Or does a shot of whiskey seem to be the cure?

I NEED ANSWERS!