Kleenex

Today I give the inventor of Kleenex, or facial tissue (to be completely unbiased towards certain brands as we learn to be in journalism classes and AP style), a hand. Bryn kindly passed on her cold to me last night and I've been fighting a losing battle with a scratchy voice, coughing attacks, and a stuffy nose since then. Those of you in Adv. Creative Writing can attest to this. For those of you not in that class, here's a short-form of the episode I had in class today. We had a workshop day and decided that, since we were tired of reading our own pieces out loud to the entire class (of four students and the teacher), we'd each read the story of the person to our right. This meant that I had the immense privilege of reading Janelle's masterpiece. I was going along reading the story passably well (although not as well as the amazing story deserved) when I got to somewhere around the second last paragraph of the second last page. All of a sudden I took a breath that hit a certain section of the upper part of my trachea. So basically I got this enormous tickle in my throat/cough attack and had to dash, with water bottle firmly clutched in hand, to the washroom where, within a minute or two, I had the tickle/cough under control once again. I'm sure I made quite the scene, but in that kind of a situation there's only one thing to do; immediately run from the room and take cover in the nearest washroom to mop away the cough-tears and blow the suddenly-runny nose. Ahh, the joys of having a cold. Yes, I'm very thankful to the Japanese for inventing, washi, the first facial tissues, all those centuries ago.