No one cares if you get a cold

I felt sick this week and that was bad, because when I'm sick I feel insulted if I have to do anything.

"I should probably get out of bed and go to work," I say indignantly to myself in the morning. "That's fair."

I was especially insulted this week because my illness was a cold and no one cares about that. Telling someone you have a cold will actually make that person temporarily hate you no matter how bad your cold is.

It's like telling someone about your vacation. The more details you give, the worse it gets.

This is because a vacation is just a vacation and a cold is just a cold and, if either gets more interesting than that, they become something else.

A vacation that becomes interesting might turn into a something like a hijacking and a cold that gets interesting will develop into a disease like smallpox.

I guess it's hard to argue that a cold could become interesting even on that basis, though, because most exciting diseases, like malaria, begin with a fever and flu-like symptoms before they get worse.

But when you have a cold, you don't have a fever. You don't know this, however, until you ask someone to feel your forehead.

"Do you think I feel warm?" you will say, secretly hoping you do.

"No," the person will say, looking at you like the liar they think you are. "You feel fine."

But you don't feel fine and the only person who gives you sympathy, your mom, would feel bad for you no matter what you complained about.

I do enjoy sympathy when I feel sick, but what I like most of all is to take baths. My bathtub is pretty shallow, though, so all that really stays warm is my lower back.

But this is enough to make me so warm that I sometimes get tired and fall asleep. One of my friends thinks I should be careful because I might drown, but I think I would be aware enough to turn my body slightly if I were ever to encounter danger.

Colds are also bad because cold medicine tastes disgusting. I don't know why manufactures can make soda, which has no redeeming value, taste good, but can't make cold medicine taste like anything besides batteries.

I don't know why all medicine can't just taste like that pink liquid you got every time you got sick when you were a kid. If adult medicine tasted like that, I'd try to get colds more often.

- Contact reporter Dave Frank at dfrank@nevadaappeal.com or 881-1212. His column, "Songs in the Key of Me," appears Thursdays.