As my body seems to find three-day weekends to be an opportune time to succumb to one sort of contagion or another, I found myself lying around today, feeling generally miserable. Things were made much better than they could have been by the presence of my wife, lying around for a bit right next to me. (She’d been painting a bathroom ceiling all morning and was feeling generally miserable as well, but for very different reasons.)

Me: Oh … did I tell you? Today, in the shower, I coughed so hard it made my back tingle!

Shan: Um … that can’t be good.

Me: Not likely … maybe some sort of signal from my body … “Structural failure imminent. Evacuate immediately.”

(Both of us laugh aloud at this.)

Me: I am immensely comforted by the fact that there is research that shows that the “man cold” is indeed a thing … that we suffer more than women do when we’re sick.

Shan: It’s because we have to go through childbirth. Our pain tolerance is higher.

Me: I think it’s more like “since we have to go through childbirth … since you did this to us, you men will have to be unbelievably miserable every time you have a cold. And by ‘unbelievably’, we mean that we won’t believe you.”

Shan: That research was probably done by a man.

(Both of us laugh aloud again, this time more-or-less uncontrollably.)