KRIS MADDEN

My apologies for not updating these past days, in my defense, I was struck down by the almighty common cold. I'm one of those people that rarely gets sick, which means that when I do get sick it's pretty bad. But when I get sick I also try to find out different ways to get better, like one of my earlier posts about drinking water to cure my headache.

This time I found out that cough syrup, that fowl substance that was spoon-fed to me every winter has been found to have absolutely no effect on suppressing symptoms of the common cold. All these years later, I can be proud of the fact that in my youth when I told my mom or dad that I didn't want to take my cough medicine because it didn't do anything; I was right.

I like to have Halls Defense on hand throughout the year, because it's nice to have something on hand to divert your hunger or general sore throat. Yesterday, I found out, upon closer examination of the hard candy's wrapper, that there are little motivational quotes written in fine print. These are some of the actual phrases printed on the wrappers:

“Go For It.”

“Don’t waste a precious minute.”

“Get back in there champ!”

I might be wrong but shouldn't they be more comforting than enthusiastic. Shouldn't they read more like:

“Get some rest, you’ve earned it!”

“Take the day off, you’re obviously sick.”

“Going to work isn’t worth getting your friends sick.”

I learned that water and honey also had nil effect on suppressing the common cold. The more I read, the more I found out that the common cold is just something that we as humans live through, the same way we make it through traffic jams or visits to the dentist's office. We grin and bare it, and try to have the most optimistic outlook. Since statistically speaking optimistic people get sick fewer times than pessimistic people and recover faster as well.

So while I admit that I'm still sick I believe that I'm getting better and will feel 100% better soon enough. And thus far that seems to be the best cure for the common cold.