Human Beings Are Gross, Stupid.

So for the past week, I've been sick. It hasn't been as bad this week, but my throat is still a bit raw and I'm still blowing my nose about 100,000 times a day - Puffs with Lotion is God, FYI. So aside from wondering how much blood it's normal to see mixed in your dirty tissue, I've spent a fair amount of time wondering how disgusting I must look to other people on the train every morning.

Without fail, every day, my throat bothers me until at some point I force-cough and hack what can only be described as a pretty solid ball of snot out of my throat. Then I feel fine for a while. It's awesome. But to a person seated directly across from me for forty-five minutes, I would imagine listening to me hack and dry heave is at least a slightly unpleasant way to start one's morning.

So here is the story of how this particular morning went:

I switched jackets this morning, and as such, cleaned all the dirty tissues out of the coat I was to wear. I then made sure I had one of those Kleenex to-go packs in my inside breast pocket. At some point between home and the train, I used one of said tissues (I do not remember if it was in the car, walking at the station, or on the train itself) and placed it in a front hand pocket. The next time I needed a tissue was during the train ride. The tissues were missing from my breast pocket. This led to a frantic search for about 5 minutes. I checked and rechecked every pocket of my jacket at least ten times. I was then sort of resigned to my fate of reusing the same tissue one more time.

This however, would be far from the last time I needed a tissue. After the already very soiled tissue was wet and ripping apart and no longer able to be blown into in any fashion - this includes a two minute period of nonstop coughing, hacking and dry heaving in which I coughed up a slimy green snot worm - I became desperate. I tore through my bag for at leas the third time. Since I could feel the ball of mucus pulsating in my right nostril with every breath, I was in no mood to fuck around. I saw a lens cleaning wipe that I had gotten from a demonstration on HD cameras a while back. This was my last hope.

No longer worrying about who might be judging me, I proceeded to unleash the bloody glop into the makeshift hanky and let me tell you. It. Was. Good.

Relieved, I placed the now balled up and useless lens wipe into my front pocket, wondering to myself at one point I would have to use this non absorbent piece of cloth next... Of course, I then went to reorganize the mess I had made in my mad dash to find a snot receptacle, and there, on my lap, slightly covered by my jacket, sat the packet of tissues I had been searching for the whole time. Such is my life folks.

Also. Isn't being a person weird? I wondered the other day how much weight has been expelled from my body in the past week or so, in terms of mucus. How much of one's body weight at any given point is snot? Or potential snot? Because I feel like over the past week I've lost more mucus than I thought one person should have in their entire body at all.