Everyone seems to be dying this quarter. “I’m so sick,” you hear someone complain to a friend. “Something’s going around right now ...”

I know better. I’ve been sick since the moment that I walked onto this campus for the first time, but my immune system likes to be tricky. It lived a pretty boring existence before college — no excessive food-sharing, no unwashed shot glasses, no Full Moon on the Quad.

Now that I’m here, it must take some kind of perverse pleasure in the fact that I am never fully healthy. My roommate and I know that two weeks have passed when we run out of Kleenex. But this weekend was especially horrible. My sickness stopped being dormant and decided to take control.

By the time that Thursday night rolled around, I had a visiting friend (sleeping on the miniature floor of my very miniature double, spending the majority of her time getting in my way and straightening her hair), a massive head cold, an impending midterm and a huge guilt complex.

What was I supposed to do with her while I played around with matrices and biked around in the cold, extending the life of my sore throat by another few days? I felt so guilty after my midterm that I had one of my more brilliant ideas, called “Going to a Frat Filled with Freshmen on a Thursday Night When the Temperature Parallels Antarctic Lows.”

I woke up on Friday feeling like someone had turned my head inside out and pulled it down around my knees. And I lay there in pain for two hours before I realized that yes, over-the-counter drugs are made for this purpose. Then I took two Advil and felt better.

I slept through most of Friday, keeping the room in perpetual darkness and occasionally venturing out into the hallway to ask for drugs. What do you do when you’re sick? There’s not really much that you can do, and somehow everything is only amusing in retrospect.

I managed to get out of bed for the first time around seven in the evening, decided that getting dressed was too much of an effort, and wandered to some lounge in some remote location on West Campus. (Nobody cares exactly where. It’s West Campus.)

I spent some enjoyable hours watching “The Office,” which is a great show to watch when you’re sick. (You can miss as many scenes of the episodes as you want or skip around between them — because, hey, the tension between Jim and Pam is exactly the same when you wake up).

I managed to stand up for an entire game of Beirut, which showed off how sick my hand-eye coordination was (ahaha), and then I even managed to wander across campus to Stern’s Cyber Cafe. After being awake for a total of about five hours, I took Sudafed until I felt better and literally passed out in bed.

This cycle repeated itself on Saturday, though I managed to convince myself that I was working on my seminar paper by holding one of the assigned books when I fell asleep. I didn’t think much about sleeping 16 hours a day, until someone pointed out that mono was a likely culprit — especially since this had been going on for four days.

A quick Wikipedia search revealed that I had every single symptom of mono, including a severe pain in the region of my spleen. Never mind that I have no idea where my spleen is; if you have mono, your spleen can rupture and it can be potentially fatal. Dying was just what I needed to get out of writing my paper, so I extrapolated on this concept for awhile to several of my friends, who all left me to go do better things than hand me Kleenex every five minutes.

The only option left to me was Stern’s Cyber Cafe. I have to point out that Lagunita’s Late Nite is far superior, but when there is nothing else to do, Stern’s attempt suffices. In fact, going to Late Nite (twice) was the highlight of my sick weekend. It required the maximum amount of effort that I could physically put forth, the appropriate reward at the end and a strong incentive to get back in bed and rest when I got back to my room.

Being sick is a time-consuming activity — the only things that you can really do are sleep, watch TV and laugh at your dormmates when they stumble back from a party at three in the morning. Oh, and perhaps take a trip over to Late Nite. But when walking to the PHE’s room to get free medicine (again) taxes your strength, perhaps this is not the best idea.

The support of your friends is, of course, vital. But there’s always that one kid who has to make it worse. When I started asking if my spleen was likely to rupture, I got this response:

“Well, you do know that mono is just the result of a large spleen tarantula crawling around in your spleen, trying to get out into your bloodstream, right?”

I thought this was the most asinine thing that I had ever heard, but if you Google “spleen tarantula,” you get an image result. Disturbing? Yes. Activity for a sick person? Yes. Fortunately, the result of my mono test: Negative.