A Random List inspired by a Week of Sickness & How to Tell if You Are Sick

1. Take a deep breath. 

2. Cough violently. 

3. Cough for half hour. Gingerly come up for air. 

4. Check to see that all body parts survived the battle. Note that eyebrows, eyeballs, and toenails do not hurt. 

5. Go to work anyway. 

6. Use your strained voice and cough to put past due customers on guilt trip. 

7. Note that it works. Consider calling all of the worst customers to give them a taste of their own medicine. 

8. Cough intemperately and sneeze, abandon the thought of extra calls. Consider a way to collect all the energy needed to cough and sneeze and harness into powering some part of society. 

9. Realize with joy that you may not need to do another ab workout for a while. 

10. Check abs. Beginnings of a six pack. 

11.   Notice it is time for lunch. Open lunch bag. Stare blankly at assortment of Vitamin C,  Vitamin D, cough drops, teas, and pain relievers. 

12. Select three courses, beginning with an Emergen-C packet and ending with chamomile tea. Stare with disinterest at the food everyone else is eating and wonder at their taste. 

13. Note that eyeballs hurt. Remove it from list of body parts that do not hurt. 

14. Text mother to get refresher course on cold remedies. Wish desperately to be 8 years old again. 

15. Order immunity boosters. Determine to eat copious amounts of garlic from now into infinity to avoid sickness. 

16. Give up and go home from work early. Fume the whole way because mind over matter didn't work. Cry in frustration. 

17. Binge watch TV show 'Bones'. Conclude that one's life isn't as bad as all that. Cough passionately for another half hour and think that death might be a welcome release after all. 

18. Laugh at all the personal melodrama and cough because you laughed. Read The Ugly Duckling.  Smile gently. 

19. Consider it worth the cost to laugh aloud at these lines: 

Prince: It also has four legs.
Carlo: One at each corner.
Prince: In some countries, I understand, this animal is
called a "cat." In one distant country to which His Royal
Highness and I penetrated it was called by the very curious
name of "hippopotamus."
Carlo: That's right. (To the Prince.) Do you remember that
ginger-colored hippopotamus which used to climb on to my
shoulder and lick my ear?
Prince: I shall never forget. 

20. Lay around like a useless lumpkin. Wash 3 dishes and consider it a great work done. 

21. 

22. Forget random things. 

23. Stop in at the pharmacy for more cough drops and Emergen-C. 

24. Fall asleep in the middle

25. Wake up, rinse, repeat.