The UW Chronicles: Volume IX: Sunshine, Sickness and Swelling

Our cluster could be a study in virus transmission. We went to Ikea to buy the necessities (microwaveable Tupperware, mugs and can openers) and came back with colds. Damn Swedes. I woke up this morning feeling like I had been hit by a truck. Runny nose (funnily enough the nostril that was clear was the pierced one), soreness and all over ickiness. I stayed in bed and got my astronomy lecture notes from my cluster mate Elissa and dragged myself to English 198 and then sat through a Geography lecture with the sniffles. We're all sick and making soup, drinking tea and complaining about how icky we feel.

And I always seem to get sick when it's sunny. It was a thin sort of sunny today. Watery, like a thin egg yolk. It made me smile and then grimace at how pale I've become. My forearms used to be tan and the hair blonde, but they're becoming pale and the hair's darkening. I've become even more of a ghost than I was before. I tried to sit on the balcony and enjoy the sun, but the brisk cold drove me back inside. The leaves were so yellow and crisp and the trees looked even more bare without their customary shroud of fog or cloud cover. It was pretty, even through swollen eyes and the pounding of a sinus headache.

In other news, our dorm room door got swollen shut. I gripped the doorknob with two hands and braced my feet against the closet door, to no avail. Finally we were knocking on our own door and I even contemplated calling Jessica one room over on my cell phone.

Finally, Audrey heard our desperate cries and kicked the door open. We tried various remedies to ease our door's constipation. Audrey hung all her six foot tall, 180 pounds on it and eventually I attached my hair dryer to an extension cord, jumped on my bed and blow dried the top of our door. Pretty soon the blow dryer overheated and shorted out. The top of the door was warm to the touch and the slight bulge that I had felt earlier was gone, so we went to close it and it worked! It even closes quieter than before. Halleluia ingenuity! Living in a dorm (a "ghetto" one as my roommate puts it) and being a very cheap college student teaches you that necessity really is the mother of invention. We invent all sorts of ingenious ways to make life more bearable. I make wonderful black tea in my plunger pot, and cook pasta in my water boiler, and Patricia makes stuffing by pouring boiling water into a bowl of ready made stuffing mix so she can feel like she's at home. Our shower rod is held up by duct tape and we hooked up a sound system in the bathroom so we can sing in the shower to Frank Sinatra. It all works out, and we have a lot of fun molding our strange habits and hobbies to dorm life. And I'm certainly a better, more adaptable person for it. We're like Darwin's finches, we all have our own little ecological niche.