This one is for my friends Dee and Elizabeth.
I woke up this past Monday morning with a sore throat. It wasn’t scratchy, as if I had been talking too much or too loudly the night before. It was more a feeling of tightness. It felt a little smaller, a little more constricted, than usual. The classic precursor to a cold. I spent that day in my room, intermittently reading the news and watching “Grey’s Anatomy,” from the beginning. (Sometimes when I am sick, or think I might be getting sick, I try to torture the sickness out of me by watching marathons of some of the cheesier shows available. A few years ago it was “The Secret Life of the American Teenager.” I will never be the same.) The day went along and my overall feeling of sickness stayed relatively the same. I felt a little bit tired with that kind of naggingly tight throat and a very tickly, but not runny, nose. Maybe this was it. A lamb of a cold.
On Tuesday I woke up feeling more or less the same. I, once again, forewent my run in an attempt to stave off the sickness a little bit longer or, hopefully, to avoid it all together. I ate an orange because, you know, vitamin c. Then I headed into the city to meet my friend Dee at the study center at our school to do some work, me on my thesis, which I am paying to write, and her on a cool project that she is getting paid for because she is smart and awesome and on top of her shit. Go Dee!
The study center is a quiet place. There was a group of rather rowdy Parson’s students behind us (aren’t the loud ones always from Parson’s?) who Dee and I thought should have used a study room rather than the study center to work on a group project that involved multi-media images and things. Dee kept giving them the best nasty looks I have seen in years. It was pretty classic. We were working for hours, drinking too much coffee, eating Haribo peaches. Through the entire afternoon I kept having this annoying tickle in my right nostril. I kept plugging my nose and looking up at the light, hoping to keep the sneeze from bursting forth. Then, all of a sudden, I got a super intense tickle and ACHOO! It was, literally, the loudest sneeze I have ever sneezed in my entire life. It sounded, as determined with help from my friend Elizabeth, much like a cruise ship horn, if, rather than being a soothing, 5-10 second long sound it came out, all at once, in a huge burst. I looked around the silent study room to see a number of startled faces looking back at me. I frantically looked at the floor, acting as if I had dropped a pen in hopes that people wouldn’t credit me with the heart attack-inducing sneeze. I had to go to the bathroom to blow my nose and wash my hands, but I feared that if I left my seat right away the few people who didn’t know the sneeze was mine would soon come to realize I was the culprit. I looked up at Dee. She had an expression that communicated to me both shock and amusement.
“Excuse me.”
I whispered. Although at that point I might have been better off screaming it. About 2 minutes later, after touching nothing in an effort to not spread my sneeze-germs everywhere, (it was a dry sneeze, by the way), I quickly and quietly made my way to the bathroom to blow my nose and wash my hands. And that, my friends, is the story of the loudest sneeze I ever sneezed.
In other news, I read this in The New Yorker while waiting for the train Pre-Loudest Sneeze and it made me laugh. You might like it too.
“(Grover) Norquist attributed the Presidential result to the Obama campaign’s success in portraying Romney as ‘a poopy-head.'”
No, seriously. And…that is all.
franklyrebekah 