The Trouble With "Creamy White" Lung Excretions...

So I'll be posting about our (fucking freezing cold)((did I mention BRRR?)) Rock the Dock IV excursion at some point this week, but at the moment I'm busy trying to make my coughing productive, which according to About.com means that I should be "producing excretions" and that I should also be noting the color of said secretions, which will range from "dark red" to "creamy white", and REALLY? Is "white" not a good enough description of the color? Because I didn't realize Behr was consulted in the naming of the various colors of productive cough excretions, and while they're at it, they might as well go all O.P.I. on our asses and name phlegm colors like "Funny Bunny" or "Just Tea-sing". Or "Mucus Plug".

If you haven't guessed, I'm sick again. Gray got sick on Friday and then I got sick on Sunday, and together we are one gigantic ball of pathetic sick pussies, and now I'm picturing mangy cats fighting over a scrap of cantaloupe rind in a dumpster. We're even more pathetic than that, I assure you.

I've been trying to figure out why the hell we've both had upper respiratory infections several times this year because normally I get sick once a year, in the fall, and it's always brought on by allergies to some kind of devil pollen spore in the air in Minnesota, perhaps due all the gays, because isn't everything their fault? I normally don't deal with the allergy attack, so it turns turn into a sinus infection and then into walking pneumonia and then I lay on the couch in a feverish haze of Oprah and Saltines until my coughing becomes productive and I stop seeing Richard Simmons doing the tango on the ceiling.

This time, I have no allergies. I have no fucking reason to be a walking, whining, phlegmy excuse of a human being.

I mentioned this to a co-worker who said nonchalantly, "Oh, didn't you know? Everyone around here gets sick. It's because there's no fresh air."

And I was like, "EUREKA! That's probably exactly what the hell is going on!" because we work in a really big building full of people - public people, germy people - a building through which stale air is circulated through the germy, public people and then recirculated down to my office all.day.long. My office is underground. No windows. No fresh air. PUBLIC GERMS EVERYWHERE.

Not only does Gray breathe the germy air, but he deals directly with the germy public all day long, touching them and touching things they've touched and then touching things like his STEERING WHEEL and his LUNCH BOX. And now I realized it sounds like he works in a brothel.

We're both OCD hand-washers. In fact, I am perpetually skinless on my hands from washing them all the time (a habit I picked up when I was a waitress), and Gray washes his hands every 45 minutes to an hour, but there's nothing we can do about washing the AIR, and ohthankgod now it's finally all making sense, because I was starting to google "lung cancer" and "cystic fibrosis", and if you think search results for "productive cough" are gross, don't even get me started on "lung mites", people.

So now I can feel free to keep smoking, right?