Of Colds and Mummies

Hi. I have a cold. It's driving me crazy. How are you?

Seriously. This cold is rebelling, trying to bring me down. It has gone Egypt on me. Yes, I just turned a current event into an adjective.

While we were cleaning for cleaning checks last night, my roommate got a cryptic text message. "Are you watching? It just happened." She had no clue what it meant.

"Egypt?" I offered. I was scraping soap residue off the washing machine. "Maybe they finally got rid of Mubarak."

She thought about this for a moment, on her hands and knees in front of the oven. "Oh my gosh," she finally said, "what if it's the third world war?!"

I stopped scraping. If my brain could ever work at genius speeds, it did right then. In a single second, I imagined all of life during and after World War III. Billions of images flitted through my mind. My family watches too many apocalypse movies, if you ask me.

I picked at some dried blue soap with my fingernail. "I don't think so."

After a long five minutes, we learned that the text was simply referring to the newest episode of The Office. (Really?) No world-wide warfare yet. But maybe--just maybe--having a cold isn't so bad.