i think i got lucky growing up in the hill country. my parents encouraged active play outdoors, and it didn’t take much goading to get me and Fuz, my childhood playmate, to go gallivanting around outside.

i am lucky not only because i had a bad-ass childhood (yeah, i just described childhood as bad-ass), but i also got a kick ass immune system (yep, my immune system is kick-ass, notice the subtle syntactical differences between bad and kick). i am quite healthy today, i would like to believe, as a result of frequent exposure to all sorts of germs and filth in the country along with a certain, yet expected, childhood disdain for bathing.

however, i have a housemate this year that has zero immune system.
long story short:

Roomie’s immune system – 0

Any germ, virus, bacteria, spec of dust Roomie comes into contact with – 1,000,000,000.

and that’s not a fun match.

so when the swine flu pandemic was, and still is to an extent, the seasonal thing to worry about (other topics have been overpopulation, global warming, genetic engineering), my housemate got to be “the mask girl”

did “the mask girl” have the swine flu? no

did people assume she had swine flu? perhaps a few of the dimmer bulbs in the batch, despite the fact that Trinity would be oh-so much more careful than that.

was “the mask girl” over-paranoid? no

did people assume she was over-paranoid? probably. a lack of immune system doesn’t have the same visual cue as say, a lack of a left ear does…please note i am not suggesting that lopping off her left ear would have elicited a different reaction: “Oh look, she’s not over-paranoid about swine flu; she’s only wearing a mask because she doesn’t have a left ear. I get it now.”

no matter what the case may be, it is never any fun being “the (insert noun or derogatory adjective here) girl/boy/kid/whatever”

during high school, i am proud to say that for a time i was the rolley-bag girl. i, however, didn’t have a doctor prescribe a rolley-bag for my weakened immune system. nope. i just wanted to buck tradition and see what it felt like. yeah it sucked. that particular phase lasted about three to six months, and then i couldn’t take it anymore. classmates made fun of my rolley-bag behind my back and to my face and often kicked my rolley-bag as i scooted down the hallways. high school just couldn’t handle my rolley-bag awesomeness. it was a good experience in a kind of cruddy way.

anywho, back to the swine flu, i donned the mask with my buddy on the first afternoon she had to go to campus with the mask on. we went to the speech and drama building to tell one of her profs not to be surprised when she showed up in class with the mask.

it wasn’t until later during our graduation party (more on that in upcoming blogs) that we took these pictures. but i thought you would enjoy them.

the whole mask thing didn’t last too long, because it got too hot to be able to breathe. those things are surprisingly difficult to breathe under. i think i’ll need some fitness training to partake in the outdoor mask wearing competition. we took these at our graduation party (more on that later) and fyi, we are smiling under the masks.

all the same, it looks like, at least for now, we’ve got the swine flu under control, which of course is extremely fortunate.

that is all
madsks