The Plague Fairy casts her shadow over Bowdoin

A Sojourn in Civilized Life: My last first column of my last first semester

A couple weeks ago, I pressed my nose up against the small square of Plexiglas next to my seat as JetBlue Flight 606 hovered over Portland. I've made the same descent countless times during my time at Bowdoin, but I still can't help feeling a little awe-inspired by the scattered lakes and bewildering forests of Maine's landscape. Born and raised in the Midwest, New England still has an exotic draw for me; the curious charm of lobster boats, in fact, eliminated any need I ever felt to study overseas. Land's End would suffice.

A Sojourn in Civilized Life: Assassin II: Bowdoin becomes a polar-bear-eat-polar-bear campus

By the time this article is published, I could be a goner. I write this on the threshold of a battle that could go on for months. I have 11 hours and 45 minutes until Bowdoin becomes a polar-bear-eat-polar-bear campus. Until we are no longer a cozy liberal arts college on the coast of Maine, but a war zone recognizable only by the crumbling, blood-stained polar bear statue standing solemnly at its center. Some may attest that I'm exaggerating, but I say to you, my comrades-in-arms, that the protest is only made in denial of the apocalyptic undertaking set to begin at 8 a.m. on Thursday, October 16, 2008. Campus-Wide Assassin II is upon us.

A Sojourn in Civilized Life

The Plague Fairy casts her shadow over Bowdoin

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Annie Monjar

Columnist

September 26, 2008

Last Monday morning, as I brushed my teeth, my roommate came into the bathroom pressing a wad of tissue to her nose.

"Whush wong?" I asked through a foam of Crest.

"I think I'm getting sick," she said, turning on the faucet with the hands that had just held the repository tissue.

"Oh, I'm shorry," I responded. But in the back of my head, through the toothbrush's bristling and the running water, I heard an eerie voice: "Seven days..."

And like clockwork, this past Monday, I woke up with my throat scratchy and nose stuffed. In my sleep, the Bowdoin Plague Fairy had come and cast her sticky spell on me, sprinkling a pixie dust cocktail of bacteria, pollen, sleep deprivation, and poor nutrition on my unsuspecting sinuses.

The Plague Fairy comes but once a year, usually for a three-week stint from late September to mid-October. She leaves behind a trail of congestive residue, however, that never permeates the Bowdoin Bubble's thick membrane. The nasal-residing dust scatters, becoming less concentrated on individual students but uniformly spread over campus.

The result is a campus of 1,800 students, 25 percent of whom have a full-blown cold all the time. 'Tis the season for Emergen-C packets and Dayquil-popping, but the spirit of congestion will stay with us year-round. Once the Plague hits you, you can be prepared to not take a complete, unobstructed breath of air until the last final exam of your spring semester.

It's no secret that college students have a better shot at winning the lottery than they do avoiding illness at school. Every facility, every piece of equipment we use is public: bathrooms, computers, drinking fountains, etc. Even the coffee taps (which I come into contact with countless times a day) have been touched by people just finishing putting their hands near their mouths.

Until college, I used to love being sick. Not gut-wrenching stomach-flu sick, but the kind of sickness that would make my parents feel just guilty enough for sending me off to school and thereby endangering the health of other kids. Sleeping in, followed by a day in front of the TV with a box of tissues, and a bowl of Ramen delivered with a heart-warming dose of maternal sympathy.

The tragedy of college illness is not its inevitability, but its destruction of the fond associations I always had with a case of the sniffles. Sickness at school gets you no time off from your daily stresses, but instead intensifies them two-fold. Going to class and writing papers on a brain foggy from oxygen deprivation and sinus pressure takes all the coziness out of colds.

But while everyone around me is swimming through the same sea of phlegm, I haven't stopped looking for sympathy. I tell everyone I see that I'm sick, alerting them of the progress of my recovery.

To a casual "how's it going" from someone I only vaguely recognize in the Coles Tower elevator: "It's okay. I think I've got whatever's going around. Don't you hate that? Just when we have the most work, right? So annoying. I woke up a couple days ago all stuffed up. Couldn't believe it. I have a cross-country meet this weekend! What am I supposed to do? Oh, I'll just get off on whatever floor you're getting off at."

To a professor I bumped into outside of Sills Hall: "Oh, I'm just headed to Hannaford. I'm sick, you see, so I have to go buy some Nyquil and some of those Hall's Fruit Breezer thingies. I used to use Luden's, but I found that Hall's are better for congestion, because I'm very stuffed up, you see, so the vaporizing really helps with...oh, okay, I'll see you next week!"

To a classmate who neither asked nor cares: "Sorry about all the sniffling in class! I've been sick. Total phlegm-fest. I think I'm about 60 percent better, though. I told you 40 percent on Wednesday? Well, I guess I'm making progress, then!"

Clearly, I've even gone so far as to write a column about getting sick that I know will be printed for the entire school to read.

So while we all prepare ourselves for the minor, yet perpetual, head cold that will rest like a fog over the remainder of the academic term, bear in mind that you're not alone in your suffering. Know that when the Bowdoin Plague Fairy comes to your door in the next couple of weeks, you'll be ringing in the cheer of a new flu season with countless other victims, like me. Although I think I'm about 70 percent better.

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