The Modern Plague

Is it H1N1?  Is it ebola or the black death making a comeback?  No one knows, but it's certainly sweeping the college campus right now like a redheaded stepchild put to task by an evil stepmother.  In the span of 24 hours I went from perfectly fine, to feeling like I was completely silt-faced and brain-smashed intoxicated, to puking my guts out in the bathroom stall, then sweating in bed some more, then back to perfectly fine.  Now my circadian rhythms are so screwed up I couldn't sleep from 11 to 7 if you drugged me.  Thus, this blog.

But somethings good did come out of all this mess.  First, the population of the campus has been effectively halved, freeing up a silt-ton of tuition money for scholarships, campus improvements, etc.  Sure, there are bodies everywhere rotting in the sun, but the survivors are left with a much less crowded school.  Also, I had an amazing dream during my fever-induced delerium, one which is entirely too complicated to share in the space of one blog.  But to put it succinctly, a time-traveling boy from the waaaay back past flees to the present (which he considers to be the future, a paradox that pretty much throws a big wrench in the theory of time travel) and befriends a cute but too-shy nerd-girl.  The boy, as he regains his elusive memory, teaches her how to fly and together they go on adventures that end with his tragic but ultimately necessary suicide that puts the flow of time back into its proper place.  Another long story made short, the dream was awesome and I'm going to write a play about it.  Thus The Architect may be a little sidetracked until I get this itch out of my system.  Though I'm a thespian, I've never written a play before.

As used as I am to ironic and somewhat silly situations, the experience of sitting through classes that look like they've been part of a zombie apocalypse movie where everybody dies messy and excrciating deaths is definitely a new one.  Having survived a modern-day plague that made the K-something virus from I Am Legend look like a common cold, I have prepared a short list of good things to do should the plague (which I am now dubbing The Un-be-mucking-lieveablly Horrible Disease from Hell) ever come to your town:

One: Get the hell out of town.  DON'T stay inside your house and try to wait it out.  That's when the zombies get you.  If you can't get out of town or you know that all the other towns will shoot you if you try to immigrate (think Last Town on Earth), make sure that your house/dorm is well-stocked with two-by-fours, nails, and miscellaneous blunt objects.  Seriously, you can't take the threat of zombie apocalypse too lightly.

Two: Stock up on vitamin C.  I don't care if you buy tablets, powder, those delicious little tic-tac things, or milk it from oranges yourself (what is that called, orange juice?), but get about 5,000 times the daily value of vitamin C in your system.  The stuff works wonders.

Three: Do not eat in the public café.  Do not go to the public cinema.  Do not go to the public festival in the park.  Do not engage in the public orgies put on by the local Frat house.  In fact, anything with the word "public" in the description is best avoided.  Again, see step one and make inferences.

Four: Invest in a small freezer, a microwave, 20-gallon jugs of water, and a month's supply of frozen dinners.  Also, consider investing in General Motors, I hear they've been doing well (not!).  Though you will be completely isolated from the outside world (chamber pots are good, too), you can never go wrong with a little hand sanitizer.  That silt mucks up the environment by producing ultra-hardy bacteria, but is better than the alternative of, say, DYING.

Five: Do not leave the haven of your home until you hear the military driving through the streets in tanks with megaphones telling everyone to come out of hiding.  Be sure to check first that it isn't a trick to get you out of your fortress, though.

Anyway, follow these steps and I'm sure you'll all be fine.  Humanity lived through the dark ages, so it can live through these, too.