Academic life is difficult enough without the added stress and time needed to hold down a part or full-time job, as well as balancing extracurricular life and managing finances. Sprinkle in some pestilence and disease (courtesy of your roommates, neighbors and classmates) and a semester (an already expensive and well-coordinated four-month plan of academic attack), can be obliterating.
Why do horrendously sick and possibly contagious college students come to class?! I’ve never understood it. Spoiler alert: I never will.
If I hear wet, slurping, nose sucking sounds as you try to contain the slime in your sinuses, you should go home. The bubbling sound of phlegm lapping the brain in waves gives me an urge to run and an urge to pull a trash bag over the diseased party’s existence. The inability to act on these instincts, on a spectrum of reactions between escape and capture, leaves me no resort but to write this medicinal manifesto.
I can also see you haven’t bathed. I understand you didn’t get much sleep and barely found it in yourself to drag yourself from your own filth. Glad you still got that greasy bronchitis in your hair.
What brand of deodorant is that? Axe Influenza.
I swear I’m not a fascist germaphobe; I’m pretty gross myself when I want to be. So for midterms, presentations, exams and anything you can’t miss without dire consequences, by all means, bring your barf bucket and slurp all the sinus slime you can handle, just don’t sit within 15 feet of me or any other primed carrier.
A quick check in the mirror and a resounding open mouthed, “AAAAHHH,” in the morning could reveal that your tonsils have actually become enraged kielbasa sausages with a pearled glaze of death. Hit the warm saltwater gargle and rinse for some homemade relief and stay HOME if this is the case. Not too many of us mutants out there are still flaunting tonsils but good on ya’ for keeping your nodes.
Finally, we all know the person hacking, coughing and drowning in wet oatmeal.
Did you know that’s actually, really, how drowning in wet oatmeal sounds?
SCUBA diving in gravy? Too graphic.
Drowning in wet oatmeal is no fun and there’s help available if you’re coughing up greasy grimy gopher guts too. Visit the UW Student Clinic, a nurse practitioner or seek some sort of medical attention. Whatever you do, please, PLEASE STAY AWAY FROM CLASS.
Nobody wants to count the waves of mucous sloshing around your sinuses. Nobody wants your impenetrable film of filth after not showering away the glow accumulated in a fevered night of sick sleep. Tonsils shouldn’t resemble sausage. And, nobody wants to hear you blowing bubbles in your oatmeal.
