I’m just shaking off a cold and I’m now starting to shift into the pink. This being my second cold in a relatively short span of time, my parents worried and fussed over me (from a distance). Happily I can use my illness as an excuse not to be cordial over the phone or see them in person.

In one of our daily “this is how I think your life should be managed” phone calls with mom, she non-challantly slipped in the statement “Dad says he wasn’t as sick as you are, at your age.” As mom’s general tips of well-being, finance, and cultural sensitivity kept puring from the receiver, I pondered Dad’s remark.

Dad was in the air force at my age — living on an island nation, in a time where recreational travel on a fecal tube was an extravagance, where drug reps to this day aren’t driving around in fancy cars pushing antibiotics and resistant strains of germs, without a global economy that relies on businessmen spreading commerce and viruses as easily as shaking one’s hand. Dad’s exposure to migrating vectors at my age, was very very slim.

It is an amazing feat that I am not sick every day of my life between the flux of H1Bs on planes to/from their countries, the lack of hand washing skills of everyone’s children, and the sheer determination of people not to use their “sick time” to recover from being sick (as I am guilty of). I can choose be healthy and cold/flu free in my 20s, I just have to isolate myself from people and places. How am I supposed to cultivate a jaded world view and disdain for the common man without getting a little friendly with the natives, or in my case… natives and migratory foreigners who wish to be natives?