Last night I started getting sick again. I can’t tell you how exhausting this is. In bed before midnight, I spent most the night sweating. I’m not sweating now, so Dad said it could have been the heater in the waterbed “acting up.” I plan to have a stern talking to it later on. Anyway, I’ve spent most the day generally worn out, coughing up junk, and nursing a mildly sore throat. I keep telling myself it could be worse. It could be worse, Marcus. It could be worse.

Could it, Also Marcus. Could it really?

Thinking this could be sinus related (since everything with me is sinus related), I ventured out of the house earlier to the Asian food market in search of more Kimchi to swab in my nostrils. I ran out of Kimchi last week and had gotten some from Walmart, but Dad says it’s not the same thing. (I’m not sure how he knows this.) Y’all, the Asian food market has a giant nativity scene set up right by the entrance. This is something I’ve never seen before–the virgin birth inside a local grocery store. Personally, I was disappointed that the baby Jesus wasn’t actually Asian, but talk about one-stop shopping–soy sauce, salvation for the world, and twenty-pound bags of rice all on the same aisle.

I always feel slightly conspicuous when I shop at the Asian food market, like I don’t really belong there because I’m white. Today the woman at the checkout station was wearing rubber gloves as if she were a dentist or surgeon, someone with a medical degree. If I were to ask her about the gloves, I’m sure she’d say they were a sanitary measure, but I thought, You’re not fooling anyone, lady. You’re no doctor. Well, apparently I’m no doctor either, since when the total came to $8.36, I only handed the lady $8.00. (I could have sworn it was $9.00, but hey–my brain is full of snot.) Then the language barrier thing happened, her asking for 36 cents to complete the sale, and me thinking she just wanted the change to make her life easier, like she was gonna give me a dollar back.

“But I don’t HAVE 36 cents,” I said.

She kept pointing at the screen where the total was, then, almost as an afterthought, showed me the one five and three one-dollar bills I’d handed her. Well crap, I said to myself. Convinced she thought I was a stupid American, I apologized as I handed her another dollar, which she gladly took with her rubber-glove-covered hand. I was so embarrassed, I couldn’t get out of the store fast enough. I didn’t even slow down to tell Mary and Joseph how neat and tidy I thought the manger was. Maybe next time I see them I can say, “You’ve really cleaned this place up. It’s just, well, immaculate.”

When I got home and did the kimchi treatment, Dad suggested that I take a Mucinex, something I haven’t tried since this whole sinus disaster started a couple months ago. I mean, it’s not that I haven’t considered it, but when I used Mucinex a year ago, it made my heart race. Of course, that was the extra strength and this was the regular strength, so I ended up saying, “What the hell” and popping the pill. As the Mucinex commercial says, “Let’s end this.”

Now it’s been two hours, and I’m ready to go back to bed. Since I have a dance lesson to teach later, that’s probably not going to happen, but maybe that means I’ll sleep even better tonight. When I woke up sick today, I really wanted to get frustrated and throw a tantrum. You’ve got to be freaking kidding me. This again? But I’m really trying to be more patient than that. More than anything else, I’m trying to be more compassionate than that, to realize that my body is obviously having a hard time here. I guess this is how life goes–some days you wake up well, some days you wake up sick. Hell, some days you walk through a nativity scene in an Asian food market, so let’s stop pretending anything makes sense on this planet, simply take things a day at a time, and do what we can with the day we’ve been given.