Sick again

I caught another cold yesterday night. I've had colds on and off for the last month. It's hard to tell if it's one long cold or if I've wandered into some kind of buffet and can't find the exit.

I went down to the pharmacy a few minutes ago and slammed right into the barrier between Chinese and Western medicine. In America, they usually ask you about the symptoms you're experiencing and then pronounce a diagnosis - you have a cold. No shit. Sometimes it's cancer. Then it's "oh shit." But things aren't so simple here. In Chinese medicine, there are several different types of colds, depending on the season and how you acquired them.

Me: I have a cold, can I have some cold medicine?
Pharmacist (a nice elderly lady): What kind of cold?
Me: Excuse me?
Pharmacist: is it from running the air conditioner, or were you in a cold place, or did you catch fire? (上火 - Catching fire - the most common ailment Chinese people complain about, symptoms ranging from diarrhea to constipation to scratchy throats to pimples and many more. In general, it means something is inflamed, and you need to fight that fire with something intrinsically cool, like cucumbers and water. Foreigners are generally mystified by the concept.)
Me: I...have no freaking clue
Pharmacist: shame on you, you don't even know your own body!
Me: could someone have sent the cold to me in an email?
Pharmacist: don't be a smart ass, you need at least realtime audio to catch a cold over the network. Here are three types of cold medicine, pick one yourself.

I ended up picking the "wind-heat cold" (风热感冒) medicine. The other prominent choice was "wind-cold cold" (风寒感冒) medicine. We'll see what happens. Or maybe we won't. Chinese medicine is very much a slow cure, you never know whether it helped or you managed to recover on your own.

One of the things Mario was always better at than me is urination. Not only could his stream cut metal (you could hear it from the local KFC), while my stream couldn't cut the line at the KFC, but he could empty out 0.75L at a time. I averaged 0.25L with a rare max around 0.4L. How do I know this? Occasionally the bathroom is taken, and there's a bladder emergency among the leftover roomizens. If the bathroom is occupied by a girl, everyone knows that there's imminent danger of permanent bladder damage, so they usually grab a bottle and pee in it. Then everyone else grabs a bottle and pees in theirs. Don't worry, we do this privately, we don't compare equipment or anything.

Anyway, I've never managed to fill a 0.4L bottle in one go, and no amount of practice or holding it in seemed to help. But this morning, that looked like any old morning, with no hint of the epic feats about to transpire, I woke up to a bladder emergency. The bathroom was taken by one of my new roommies, the one with breasts. I found an empty bottle, 0.45L, and filled it up with pee to spare. This is momentous day, make no mistake about it.

Practice

I think it's time to start practicing guitar again. I've pretty much abandoned serious practicing since I realized I'll never have the patience to become half as fast as Yngwie or Steve or John or even Jimmy, who's the best even if he wasn't the fastest. But practicing seems to be correlated with improvement. Time to investigate that correlation.

Moonwalking practice is going pretty well, or so claims the wall-length mirror on the wall-length wall in my student's house. My student claims otherwise but I think I see the gliding coming through. I wish I could set a 5 second time delay on the mirror so I could see myself from my student's intertial frame of reference. Mirror scientists, you know what to do.

I've been suffering from a cold the last few days, though suffering is a wild exaggeration. More like perpetually inconvenienced. Meaning my nose opens its floodgates during the day to prevent bihandular typing, seals the doors with a vacuum seal at night to prevent shnobular breathing and my throat houses an evil little perpetual tickling machine which the laws of physics have yet to assuage. The only thing that's been out of the ordinary with this cold is that this time I'm being a good boy and taking some medicine. I have no idea what the medicine is; it was sent over by Yuan Yuan's mom, all I know is that it's blue. I also know that I haven't turned blue yet myself, though I've yet to inquire whether that's a good or bad sign. I'm also taking the usual anti-cold concoction prescribed by Professor Karlsson on the Roof: copious amounts of candy and faulty thermometers.

The Wonderful World of Mucus

If you don't want to read about mucus coming out of various orifices of my body, stop reading now.

Over the last few days, my sickness has summoned vast amounts of mucus to aid in its quest to torture me. The current trend is a steady migration upwards through my body. If this journey continues in similar fashion, the story of my malady may get a whole lot more interesting.

Two days ago, my throat was my only enemy, and I frequently cleared it, spewing yellowish globs wherever I happened to have been aiming. Yesterday, my nose joined in on the game, and I found myself with two more nozzles to spray out of, and as trigger-happy as a Clint Eastwood movie. Today, the mucus has completed a leg of the journey and resides almost solely in my nose. Unfortunately, due to my severe case of JAD (Jammed Attention Disorder - the inability to switch attention quickly), I often find myself stripping off headphones and guitars and catching drips Mission Impossible style, i.e. nanoseconds before they hit the floor. But this is irrelevant. What's bothering me is where this mucus is heading next. "Ear-nose-throat" I hear are connected, so I may soon be blowing my ears (I've been practicing all day). And after my ears have succumbed, what next? In the worst case, I'll be blind for a while, but in the best, I may have a imminent cure for my dandruff problem.