the sloppy copy

First, here’s a hot pic of what I’ve been sharing my bed with for the past week:

Yes, I will pay cash money to see Crank 3, thankyouverramuch.

Oh, just kiddin’ around there, guys! Ha-ha! I am such a jokester!

Seriously, though. For about a week now I’ve been curling up at night with this:

I named the box Jason. That's not weird, is it?

I have a cold, which is an abbreviated way of saying that I’ve been a great big ball of phlegm-filled bitchiness for the past 5-10 days. Truly. Something about being mildly ill brings out the Raging She Beast within me. In the past few days, I’ve been blindingly angry at:
1. My nose, for obvious reasons.
2. My throat, for the same reasons.
3. Myself, for not being able to tell if my throat was red or splotchy or whatever else WebMD told me to look for.
4. The lighting in my bathroom, for not allowing me to properly determine the color of my throat.
5. Life. Because.
6. Everyone. Also, just because.

This particular little bout with sickness epitomizes all subsequent illness and injury I’ve experienced in my lifetime. Minor afflictions – a hangnail, a stuffy nose, a zit – cause me Diva-levels of torment. I become a melodramatic mess, laying in bed whining and cussing and moaning for someone to bring me a popsicle (this is difficult when one lives alone, and so far my neighbors have failed to fulfill my requests even though I KNOW YOU CAN HEAR ME IF I COULD HEAR YOU PUKING YOUR GUTS OUT ON MONDAY MORNING AND IT. WAS. DISGUSTING).

The few scenarios I’ve actually required medical attention, however, were decidedly less angst-filled. Once, at a friend’s house, I beaned my noggin on a coffee table so hard that I cracked my skull. After doing so, I (groggily, I assume) stood up, announced to my friends that “I have to go home now” and made my way across the street in a concussed daze. The resulting lump on my forehead was the size of a Kennedy half dollar; today, when I scrunch up my face (as with consternation, like when I get a hangnail), you can see the resulting dent and the faint zig-zag where the fracture healed above my left eye.

I also once slammed my finger in a door so hard that I eventually lost the fingernail. “Ow, that really hurt,” I repeated over and over again until Juanita realized that I wasn’t quoting a scene in Trapped in Paradise* and was actually in pain.

But I digress. See, I was discussing this phenomenon with a friend the other day and it appears that this is relatively common. She, as well as her family members, experience it too: you’re sick enough to feel shitty, but well enough to let everyone within earshot (this means you, apartment D) know about it. But when you’re really sick, you either a) feel too lousy to bitch about it or b) are too scared – oh my God is something really wrong with me? – to say anything.

So, reader(s), is this an actual thing? Or have we just isolated a weird little cluster of oddness here?

*She really thought this. We quote this line often: in the scene, a car flips over a guardrail and lands on its roof. Nicolas Cage, Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey crawl out and Nic Cage says, in his flattest, Nic Cage-iest voice “Ow. That hurt.” pause “Ow. That really, really hurt.” I tried to find a clip for you, but failed. Apolgies.