secret lepers.

I am just slightly under the weather. I'm not all out sick, under the weather like standing in the middle of a golf course with a nine iron during a thunderstorm. No, it's more like I'm under a narrow awning waiting for someone to pull up the car in a light, but steady rain. My shoes are being dripped on, and I'm a little chilly, but my head isn't getting wet.

I think I've stretched this metaphor far enough.

What I mean is that a have a mild sinus infection. I've had so many sinus infections that I can plot their course. I start out with a sore throat, the next day comes the snot. The snot is really the main event, causing drippiness and congestions and those dull headaches that happen when your head makes more snot than it has room to hold. This stage can last up to a week, and at its peak, I can feel positively drained, as if all my energy has been devoted to snot creation. At some point, the snot starts to drain into my throat, and just when I'm starting to feel better, my voice changes and everyone asks if I'm sick.

This one hasn't been so bad. Friday brought the sore throat, and I'm already at the voice change stage. One of the problems with these infections is that they're usually not bad enough to be debilitating. So I go into work like usual and hope that no one notices that I've sneezed all over every thing. There are some serious germaphobes there, and I am afraid that every time they hear my sneeze, they want to run me off the premises with a pitchfork and a decongestant. I don't like to work from home too often, and so I come in and hope that they're too absorbed in their work to realize all the nose-blowing sounds are coming from the same cube. One time, a colleague did notice. She came over and gave me some sort of powder to put into hot water so that I could be sure and get 12,000% of my daily Vitamin C requirement. I imagined my white blood cells soldiering on against the nasty snot-colored infection cells and then being bombarded with Vitamin C, which looked like overeager dogs that got in the way. Yes, I do frequently anthropormorphize my cells, why do you ask?

I know there are people who are obsessed with germs. Me, not so much. I feel like germs are pretty much unavoidable, and I seem to be doing okay. However, I have been obsessed with germs since Friday; I've been obsessed with my germs. I know that everything I've touched probably has tiny snot particles on it. Every piece of junk that I picked up at yard sales on Saturday morning became a carrier for my infection. The pump that I used to put gas in my car, the credit card I handed to the cashier at the restaurant I ate Sunday brunch at, the envelope I used to send off my power bill payment. I feel like a leper, only one that has a rare form of leprosy that no one else can detect. I'm a secret leper. Shhhh.

I suppose I should feel bad about all the innocents that have unwittingly come into contact with my snot. And I kinda do. I feel bad for the people I know, my family, my coworkers, and the friend I had brunch with (my bad). I would feel worse, except that I don't know who gave me this infection. I haven't been hanging around with anyone who was sick. That means I got it from someone else who was going around pretending to be perfectly healthy. I went to two high school graduations last week, where I came into contact with approximately 5,000 people, any number of which could have been leaving snot particles on chairs or tables or that door handle that I licked (just kidding). Who knows how many secret lepers are around us at any given time?

So it's not just me. There are other snot-spreaders. You can think I'm irresponsible or whatever, but you can't avoid the others. They're out there.