From Seinfield to Easter Egg Hunts

I've gotta go around the block for this one, but feel free to come along for the ride.

There's a great Seinfeld where Kramer likes to spend so much time in the shower he decides to install a garbage disposal so he can prepare food there. It's the same episode where Elaine's co-worker is a germophobe and her boyfriend is a recovering germophobe. After eating food prepared in Kramer's showers, her boyfriend Puddy exclaims, "GERMS! GERMS!"

That's what I've felt like the past few months. I was obsessed with not catching anything before our trip so I took all the necessary precautions. I was popping vitamins like they were going out of style. I kept my eye out for people who seemed to be sick and avoided them at all cost. I even used that hand sanitizer usually reserved for the ultra-germophobe. Fortunately, I made it through the whole trip without so much as a sniffle. In fact, I haven't been sick this entire winter. Then we get back to the States and everybody has this cold/flu thing, which I still wanted absolutely nothing to do with. So I attempted to maintain my ways of quarantine. Yesterday during our Easter services, where I shook a hundred hands and repeatedly emptied garbage cans, I must have washed my hands 15 times. I did everything I could do.

I now have a terrible cough that I can't get rid of.

So last night I ask Kelly if we have any NyQuil tablets [you know- the nighttime, sniffling, sneezing, coughing, take me and you won't wake up till Labor Day medicine]. She said she thought we did, but I checked out the medicine cabinet and didn't see any. I decided I'd take DayQuil tablets instead. DayQuil is supposed to do the same thing as NyQuil except it won't knock you out. It did stop me from coughing . . . . at 3:00 this morning. I got about three hours of uncontinuous sleep last night as I constantly woke up coughing. By the way, I saw on the news this morning that this is Sleep awareness Week. I am well aware that I didn't get any sleep last night.

This morning, as Kelly was leaving for work, I heard her say "STEVE!" Not the normal sweet "Steve" as in "Steve, you're the prettiest man alive." No, this was more like the, "Steve, would it kill you to put your cereal bowl in the dishwasher?" kind of "Steve. " She flung an entire box of NyQuil at me and said, "Do you think you got what you deserved for not looking hard enough for this last night?" To my credit, it was generic NyQuil [something called "WalQuil"], and it came in a purple box whereas I believe the official NyQuil tablets are in a green box. So maybe it wasn't all my fault.

Then again, I've always been a horrible looker. Growing up, I was always asking my mom if we had a certain kind of food in the fridge, her saying we did, me saying I didn't see, her asking if I really looked for it, me answering that I did, her pulling it out of the fridge, and me blaming the milk for obstructing my view. I'm pretty sure there are four people I knew from the days of my youth who are still missing due to my inability to finish games of Hide-And-Go-Seek. And you know those 3-D pictures that came out in the 90's that you were supposed to stare at and an image would appear? I never, ever saw the stupid thing; to this day I'm not sure if that whole picture thing was part of an elaborate hoax to fool people like me.

Maybe that's why I truly despise Easter Egg hunts. I always used to blame the pagan origins of the exercise as the reason I hate them. But maybe that's just a huge smoke screen to mask the inferiority complex I have because I'm a bad looker. But honestly, is there no better way to remember the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ than to search far and wide for hard-boiled chicken embryos? At least we can Biblically prove that we have to give Christmas gifts to each other because the three wisemen [there had to be three, right?] gave gifts to the Christ child.

And maybe all these ramblings here are a mere reflection of the lack of sleep I had last night.

I've coughed 27 times since beginning this posting.

"GERMS! GERMS!"