[...] A cold is really just being overworked and overextended, drinking too much and partying too much, generally not taking care of ourselves, the sneaky ways that depression manages to articulate itself as something more comprehensible. Because a cold is non-critical it feels, at least to me when I have one, like it has be about something other than itself, as though stuffed-up sinuses and a leaking face were just the container, just the form. The substance, the content, needs to be something else—not a cold, but an explanation. The cold must be about my flaws, my tendency to say yes to too many things, my eating habits, my laziness. Because a cold is so low-level as to not quite seem medical, it acts instead as a referendum on one’s whole lifestyle. We expect having a cold to have a thesis. There is so little to it that it has to somehow be more than itself.