H One N One

It was either this or find a picture of a real pig.

It’s really wonderful how after a couple decades with no massive global pandemics they decided to have one just in time for me to be in college, rubbing elbows (at the very least) with 20,000 other people in close proximity. That being said, I’m pretty happy the swine flu is happening while I’m in college as opposed to while I was a student at Sprague High School, where the ventilation system piped the same air from one roomful of coughing students to another, making regular attendance about as healthy as eating a piece of raw chicken you found behind the toilet on a Greyhound.

In the past, I’d worried that The Media would whip everyone into a frenzy about swine flu, leading to massive panic about an ailment that really isn’t that big of a deal unless you’re really old, really young, or otherwise ill. What I’ve found in the past month back down at school is that authority figures have whipped themselves into quite a frenzy while the students have opted to sit back and let everyone else do all the worrying.

The Oregon Marching Band is a hotbed of new and interesting diseases, maybe 10% of which are not venereal. As such, on the first day of band camp two nurses paid us a visit and made an announcement about good ways to avoid catching the swine flu – for example, they recommended that we avoid eating out of shared food sources like bowls filled with chips and refrain from sharing drinks.

And yeah, all of that sounds great, and I’m sure lots of people our age would do those things, but when you’re at a party and everybody is snacking on a big bowl of taco flavored Doritos and everybody wants to try the glass of vodka that has bits of gold floating in it, all those health-friendly tips go by the wayside. When given the choice between becoming a part of a global pandemic or being a buzzkill, a college student will always choose the global pandemic. After all, nobody wants to hear about the time you were lame and healthy at a party, but if you mention that you had the swine flu, there’s a pretty good chance someone will buy you a drink.

I can’t really tell whether the swine flu has had a massive impact at the University of Oregon yet, because my primary social outlet is the marching band, and people are always sick in the marching band. Every year during band camp roughly 40% of the band winds up getting sick with something as students’ immune systems, weakened after three months’ rest, are put to the test against puddles of freshly emptied spit and impromptu spooning. When I was a freshman something like ten people made the mistake of eating at Muchas Gracias and paid the price for several days. During my sophomore year at camp, one senior trumpet player was so badly stricken with the trots that our section leaders decreed that if you soil yourself, you’re excused from rehearsal, no questions asked.*

*For the record, each member only gets one of these per season; otherwise there would be an easy (if not necessarily dignified) way out of rehearsal every time there was a downpour.

Not helping matters is the fact that the primary bathroom for the OMB’s practice field is an aging porta-potty chained to a lamppost which, according to a sign posted on the inside of the door, is only intended to service 10 people over a 12 hour period of time before being emptied, as opposed to 200 people for two weeks (or more). I don’t know if stench translates to overall infectiousness, but I will say that if there was one person who wasn’t all that worried about stopping the spread of the swine flu, it was the guy who waited a week to come and empty out the porta potty.

I’ve always been something of a germophobe, and so the presence of a global pandemic really helps to legitimize a lot of the behaviors that people used to think were crazy, such as carrying Purell and opening the bathroom door with a paper towel. The problem is, in light of the swine flu some peoples’ germophobia has begun to outpace mine, and now I’m encountering people who carry larger bottles of Purell than mine and wear surgical masks in public. Suddenly, my old standards of germopobia aren’t good enough anymore – for hand washing to be effective, apparently, it has to last 20 seconds or more, and touching of the eyes and face is right out.*

*Sometimes I’ll get home after a long day of not touching my face, gives my hands a thorough scrubbing with soap and hot water, and then spend five minutes just touching the shit out of my eyes to make up for all the times I couldn’t during the day.

The primary reason I try to avoid getting sick (aside from the fact that being sick isn’t necessarily fun) is because being forced to miss class in college is a quick way for your grades to tank. However, now that the University administration has whipped the faculty into a frenzy over the swine flu, many of my professors have noted on their syllabi that they’re willing to make special provisions for students who are sick with the swine flu.

What this means for me is that if I’m feeling stressed out and want a little vacation during midterms, all I have to do is find the nearest frat party and start licking people until I pass out. This global pandemic stuff really isn’t all that bad.

If Truman Capps actually gets the swine flu, he hopes his professors will recognize the last paragraph as the lighthearted comedy that it most definitely is.