by 
Last Wednesday we met up with a friend of a friend (mind you, in our new expat status, people who usually would’ve been distant acquaintances feel like long-lost kin). We found him at his work, in one London’s few NYC-style skyscrapers. He was a really great guy, and we ended up hanging out all night with him. Drinks for a couple hours on the 24th floor of the building, then back to Camden for tapas and more drinking at a really cool place: El Parador. After all this revelry and kinship, pleasantly swooning on the walk home, I started to feel. . . the itch.
That itch you get in the back of your throat, telling you it’s coming. We’re not talking about the actual post-nasal drip that follows. Once the PND comes, you know there’s no turning back. The itch is just a glimmer; so slight, so timid, you tell yourself it’s nothing, it’s not the real thing, just a little itch in my throat. . . I’ll be fine. . .
But I wasn’t fine. By middle of the next day, PND had settled in with a vengeance; no doubt enjoying my desperate and futile efforts to consume as much zinc as possible. It didn’t help my state of mind that I was receiving daily missives from my mother, warning of the avian flu pandemic that is about to cripple the world’s major international centers, especially those with large immigrant communities. (“Should never have shaken hands with that nice Vietnamese couple down the hall. . .”) No, mom, we still haven’t purchased our Tamiflu.
Anyway, the cold is releasing its grip finally, but it managed to stick with me through all of my job interviews, and even time its own communicability so that Karen is getting sick right as her classes start and she’s meeting everyone in her program for the first time. Brilliant.