The Mask

Somehow, I caught, yet again, another flu.

My nose became runny, my throat became "itchy", and coughing and sneezing have become actions that I love the most because they can relieve my discomfort.

When you sneeze, you will remove that kind of pressure which builds up in your nose; when you cough, you will remove that "itch".

The "itch" is the wicked one, which makes you want to rip your own skin that covers your throat apart just to give it a good scratch.

Anyways, on Wednesday, my nose that felt like the Niagara Falls and there seems to be a feather duster in my throat that keeps tickling it.

I figured that my nose and throat are now bacteria-infested and I am now a germ-carrier. For your information, my classroom is air-conditioned and the air-con is always turned on to the "full blast" mode, thus air is not very circulated and bacteria and germs can spread around easily. For the welfare and benefit on my classmates in my class, I decided to put on a surgical mask, given by the government in the SARS "survival kit", so that my germs will not spread to someone else.

See how selfless I am.

Well, I do have my selfish reasons as well for wearing that mask.

If classrooms are ever rated for their cleanliness, just like what the Ministry of Environment has been doing to the hawkers, on the scale of A to D, my classroom would probably obtain a 'F'.

Singapore is considered to be a First-World nation, looking at how developed we are now, but once you step into our classroom, you will think that you just teleported yourself to a Third-World nation. Well, besides the huge drop in temperature due to the air-con in "full-blast" mode, our classroom is flithy, dusty, and it reeks!

Litter is everwhere, dust is everywhere, pieces of grass, leaves and grains of sand lay in heaps on the tiled-floor.

The dustbin is filled and no one bothers to empty that damn thing, and it sure resembles the "Smokey Mountains" of The Philippines.

All these because we are just too lazy to clean up the classroom, so we now end up living in a pig sty and people are falling sick one by one, like falling dominoes, and the germs are spreading like wild fire.

Hence, in order to prevent entry of more dust/germs/bacteria/whatsoevernots into my nose and down my respiratory system, I wore that blue thing over my two orifices to keep myself protected.

That mask sure invited a lot of attention from my teachers. Everyone who comes in ask me about it.

So weird to see someone in mask meh?