what color is your sputum?

I'm wandering around work hacking and wheezing like a nicotine-crazed asthmatic, every so often letting loose with a gut-wrenching cough that sprays germs around me in a cloud of doom ten feet wide. Insofar as beauty's glory is concerned, today is more of a valley than a peak. My face feels an imperialist urge to expand, as if its peers Skull and Brain are pressuring it to encroach on the borders of neighboring states -- Canada, for instance -- in a preemptive strike against polite people everywhere. My nose has taken on an angry redness more often seen on alcoholics and Brits, which I'll admit is a bit of a redundancy in comparison. My eyes are livid and swollen as well, adding to their normal scintillating charm a watery ebullience that could stop a horny rain frog's heart.

In other words, I have caught a cold bug, passed on to me by one of the Purple Monkeys who kept pirouetting their disease-wracked corpses through my cubicle over the last two weeks. Any one of the several could have been responsible for my particular strain of bacterial warfare; every variety of hacking, wheezing, coughing, aching, fever, stuffy nose, runny nose, sneezing, and sputum-expectorating wandered within my sphere before I got sick. For all my new and improved diabetes management, I'm still like the roach motel when it comes to flesh-eating illnesses. Microbes check in. They don't check out.

It hit me on Thursday morning, and by Thursday afternoon I'd left work, driven home, and buried myself under a mountain of cushions. Flamingo, best of the best, had sent me books to wile away my idle hours. Sadly, I found that the reading of Dorothy Dunnett requires something notable in terms of demands placed on the brain -- namely, the presence of one -- so I put away that reading material and fell asleep while listening to P.G. Wodehouse books on tape.

Stayed asleep, in fact. For the next three days.

The Guy, who invariably finds a weakened Yuhri an entertaining Yuhri, took advantage of my fatigued state to plant a massive hickey on my throat. Right in the middle of my throat. There's no hiding it, save by judicious use of accessories, or the sulky combing over of hair across the neck. I lack the former; my dresser has yielded nothing I could use for the purpose save long thermal socks and a particularly springy bra. I lack the Goth requirement for the latter, being now 30 years old and having established for myself a reputation of loud, spitfire jollity that defies teenage angst and insecurity.

Thanks to the ill-timed Guy sense of humor, I am now subjected to the occasional, sidelong stare from the odd Purple Monkey I pass in the corridors. This in itself is not so bad; I could handle the innuendo and leering, knowing smiles. What I find more jarring is the rampant Asian Tact Deficiency Syndrome, combined with a general mentality that appears to have skipped the early, high-school-groping form of sex ed.

Purple Monkey: "What's that on your throat? It is big! What is happen? You fall and hit yourself? What is hickey? It is big bruise! It is so ugly. Shape like big bat! Or penis!"

Lost, thanks to this Purple Monkey-inspired illness:

1. Friday: A lunch paid for by the Island of the Purple Monkeys, at an actual restaurant with actual waiters, as opposed to the more traditional Purple Monkey Island paid-for meal, which consists of KFC tubs or chinese food that would've tasted better if they'd bought from Safeway.
   
2. Friday: Sako's birthday.
   
3. Sunday: Brunch with Tara (and, due to other circumstances beyond our control, brunch with Kimberly.)

Revenge now lies in wandering about the company and coughing on keyboards while their owners are absent. My inadequate scientific training tells me that the person who gave me this Flu of a Thousand Sputums is most likely immune to this particular strain now. Out of all the Purple Monkeys who get sick, the one who doesn't get sick is the one worthy of my vengeance.

I shall smite with the right hand of Destruction, and grind my enemy's testicles into nasal spray.

Missing my sister's birthday -- hi, Sako! -- was, yes, the worst fallout of my sickness. While my family doesn't tend towards high revelry on the subject of birthdays in general, we do tend to offer a token nod towards the celebrant with a phone call, at the very least. Mom, who had the advantage of me in the very fact that she was, say, conscious on Friday, left her a voice message on the only phone number she had for her. Sako called her back when she was gone, and left a message to say her phone was out of service and that she'd call back later.

Mom waited.

Sako never called.

I finally talked to Sako on Saturday, after her boyfriend called and informed me that we had all missed her birthday. "But it's okay," he said cheerfully. "My family all wished her a happy birthday. My mom, my dad, my sister...."

"How'd they reach you?" I asked Sako, in my bleary cold-hazed baritone.

"They called me at the circus," she said.

"They have a number for you at the circus? I didn't have a number for you at the circus."

"And at Lombardi's."

"Did I know you were working at Lombardi's? I don't think you ever told me you were working at Lombardi's."

"And you can't call the cell phone because it's out of batteries and we can't fix it."

"Coincidentally the only phone number I have for you."

So that's that. Even if I had been firing on all cylinders I wouldn't have been able to reach her anyway. In a moment of frustration I reflected that the family of the boyfriend she's intending to break up with know her whereabouts and how to reach her better than her own family. Then, having been Sako's sister for 27 years now, I shrugged and dismissed the matter from my mind altogether. After all, she's an adult and I'm not her keeper, and I spent my Sako bail fund on the deposit for my wedding caterer.

Sako is off to Spain today for 18 days, on one of her whirlwind Insufficient Funds trips that always seem to work out for the best. She was rather brusque on her phone calls -- I was, apparently, not supposed to tell Mom that she was headed to Spain because Sako didn't want the guilt trip. I thought all I was supposed to keep out of Mom's hands was the broken wrist and the ... the other thing, which isn't really relevant here. We (Sako and I) are having a Tiff.

I ordered her to bring me back something fun from Spain anyway. Fights aside, I like presents. I don't see why emotional upheaval should get in the way of sibling greed.