Bedridden This Weekend

And I thought I can go to Bed tonight and Saturday night.

Yesterday morning I woke up with a clogged nose. Last night my throat was already itchy and I was sniffing and dry-coughing. This morning I had a runny nose. When I was a kid I thought it was “running” nose; images of sprinting noses filled my head. (When I was a kid the line “There’s a shadow hanging over me” from The Beatles song Yesterday frightened me because I actually imagined a huge shadow looking over me.) But even though I felt lousy I dragged myself out of bed. “You lack sleep,” my mom told me at the breakfast table. “Mmmmmm,” I mumbled then promptly fell asleep in front of bacon and eggs.

Today I had a print ad to churn out. In my place of work, having a print ad approved means running around after clients who are in meetings, seminars and shoots. Sheesh, today’s a perfect day to be a running nose.

My immediate client wanted to put additional visual elements in the print ad to make it more “understandable to the masses.” Actually they don’t look at the masses as mindless people: “Their sensibilities are just different,” they’d point out. Oh I see. Then her boss looked at the print ad and said, “Can we re-arrange the layout?” “But that will change the visual idea,” I pointed out. I was careful to use the word “change” instead of what I really wanted to say: “ruin.” But she insisted anyway. I wanted to turn my nose up at her, but it was busy being runny.

So this weekend I’ll skip two birthday parties and two nights of Bed-lam. Instead I’ll force myself to stay home, relax, stop and, uhm, smell the roses, but my nose is so clogged I can’t smell a thing.

(Yeah, right. And at the slightest hint of boredom, I’m off to Smegma-mall.)