13 Things that Cold Sores Completely Ruin

So, for starters, yes, I have oral herpes.  It's not even exciting.  I've had it since before I knew what STDs were, and since way way WAY before I even had my first kiss.  I didn't associate cold sores with herpes until high school.  So for me, there's no stigma about it.  I could ramble on about that, but that's way too serious for this post.  This post is more long the lines of a Funny Buzzfeed List kind of thing.

Here are 13 Things that Cold Sores Completely Ruin.

 

1. Kissing.

 

 

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 If you're single and not dating, you are luckily exempt from this one.  But for the past few days, I haven't been able to kiss my long-term, live-with boyfriend, and it's been killing me.  I keep turning to him and going in for a kiss, and he jumps away from me - as well he should, since I don't want to give him herpes - but it makes me sad to have my boyfriend jump away from a kiss.

2. Drinking - especially acidic things or hot things.

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I love me some orange juice.  I love me some hot beverages when it's cold out.  But when a cold sore is big enough, and especially if it's on my bottom lip, holding a cup to my lip hurts.  It's awful.  So I have to stick my tongue out and pretend like it's my bottom lip, which makes me look like a fool.  The easiest solution is to use a straw, which is fine for cold/room temperatures, but it's not a good idea when drinking hot cider or tea (or coffee, for those of you weirdos who like it).

 3. Eating a sandwich.

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Most of the time, sammiches are kind of tall.  Bread + toppings + another slice of bread = height.  So you have to open your mouth kinda wide to eat them.  But OH WAIT, that's gonna hurt like hell with a giant blister on your lip!  Eat nothing but peanut butter and jelly or eat NOTHING AT ALL until that thing heals.

4. Eating pretty much anything in general.

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The day I got my most recent cold sore, it didn't really pop up into a full-fledged blister until dinner time.  What did I make for dinner that night?  Spaghetti and meatballs.  Something that is both very gigantic-bite-eating (for me) and very slurp-y.  So I risked not only hurting my cold sore, but also getting the ointment I use on it all over my food and fork, which means I'd taste it, which isn't fun.  Some lip products taste okay (like my mint Burt's Bee's chapstick, mmm), but cold sore ointment is NOT on that list.  They all taste like crap.  So, when you eat, you can either wipe it off of your lip and eat with a DRY cold sore (no thanks), or you can leave the ointment on and ruin the flavor of your food.  It's your choice.

5. Spitting.

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With a cold sore on your bottom lip (where most of mine always are), it hurts to purse your lips very much.  So when I brush my teeth or hack the occasional loogie, spitting it out ends up being this sad little dribble.  Kind of like when I got my wisdom teeth taken out and wasn't allowed to create suction in my mouth.  Except instead of risking uplifting my stitches, it physically hurts my lip to actually spit.  Oh, and spitting out minty toothpaste?  Stings like a mother.

6. Whistling.

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Similar to spitting, the way you have to purse your lips to whistle hurts with a cold sore.  And I like to whistle.  If my music has a rockin' trumpet solo, or if I'm listening to Jethro Tull, I like to whistle along.  But I can't with a cold sore, and that makes me sad.

7. Smiling.

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I love to smile!  I love to laugh.  I love to be happy.  But with a cold sore, spreading my lips that much hurts!  So I laugh for two seconds until my blister starts to split, and then I get sad.  It sucks.  It feels like my cold sore is literally preventing my from being happy.

8. Pictures.

(yep, this is a selfie of ME.)

I like to be in pictures.  But when you have a cold sore, a) it hurts to smile like I said above, and b) you feel like all anyone sees on you is a giant blister on your lip that screams "LOOK AT ME!!!"

9. Showering/washing your face.

(blog.mollyskincare.com)

I don't know about you, but when I wash my face, I rub my hands all over my face.  None of that "gentle water caressing my face" crap you see in skin care commercials.  And when I shower, the water hits my face a lot - including my lips.  So what happens when I have a cold sore?  I have to awkwardly angle my face down in the shower, to keep the harsh water off of my lip; and I have to be really awkward about not touching my lips when I wash my face, because I don't want to rub my cold sore and irritate it.  Boo.

10.  Putting on chapstick (or other lip products).

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Putting chapstick on with a cold sore, you have to maneuver the chapstick around the sore.  That in itself isn't so bad, especially since most of my cold sores are in the corner of my mouth rather than smack in the middle.  But!  When I put chapstick on, I like to do a nice lip rub to rub in the chapstick.  Not doing that feels as weird to me as just rubbing a thick coat of lotion over my hand once and not actually rubbing it in.  Of course you can't do that with a cold sore!  Because a) it hurts the cold sore to be rubbed against my other lip, and b) it smears the cold sore ointment all over my other lip.  (I usually put the ointment on before the chapstick, I'm not really sure why.)  This all holds true for lip stick and lip gloss, as well, except even worse because those things have to be rubbed in to help distribute color evenly!  Luckily for me, I don't wear either of those very often - I'm generally a makeup-less face.

Subsequently...

11. The rest of your lips.

 

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If I can't put chapstick on properly, the rest of my lips get very dry and chapped and generally unpleasant.  The other day, when I first got my most recent cold sore, I actually sat in front of the mirror and peeled off all of my dry lip skin so I didn't have to feel all of those flakies all day.  Gross, I know, but cold sores are gross and they ruin everything. 

12. Swimming

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Whether it's leisurely or for exercise/competition, swimming hurts a cold sore.  All that water dries it out ridiculously.  Constantly coming in and out of the water irritates it.  The chlorine of a pool or the salt of the ocean stings like a mother!  And if you're at an outside body of water in the sun, OW BURN.  Even with an SPF chapstick, the heat burns.  One time, when my cold sore had gone from blister to scab (part of the healing process), I decided to jump off of the high dive at a pool.  I felt like I was going to land way too close to some people, so I tried to maneuver myself over in the air.  Unfortunately this caused my cannonball-posed body to land not on my feet/butt, but RIGHT ON MY FACE.  WITH A COLD SORE.  It hurt sooooo badly.  It started bleeding immediately so I had to get out of the pool.  And I didn't have my normal ointment that I use (Carmex for Cold Sores) - all I had was this special medicated stuff, which is great for the blister stage but doesn't moisturize enough for the scab stage.  So the stuff STUNG LIKE A BITCH on my open, bleeding cold sore.  Day. ruined.

And finally...

13. Running and other exercise.

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This one may just be me, but when my heart rate goes up, it causes my cold sores to pulse painfully.  Add that to the bouncing of running and I'm giving up after less than two minutes.  Plus, all that breathing through my mouth really dries out a cold sore, and I don't want to have to put ointment on with sweaty hands.

Think of another thing that cold sores completely ruin?  Leave me an angry comment calling me an idiot for forgetting the number one most important thing that cold sores ruin!  Just kidding.  Do feel free to leave a comment, but please don't call me an idiot or anything else horrible.

 

 

Life Lessons from John Robertson

My high school orchestra teacher had a huge impact on my life.  And it wasn't just because he was an outstanding conductor.  According to my older siblings, the orchestra teacher before him was so awful that the higher-talent orchestra, the one you had to audition for, sounded like crap.

Then Mr. Robertson came along, and he turned both levels of orchestra around so hard that you'd barely recognize it was from the same school.  The lower-level orchestra sounded better than the higher-level one did under the old conductor.

In my time as his student, he set a five-year goal for himself as a conductor: to bring an orchestra to State Festivals that would bring in 1s across the board.  (For those who aren't familiar, 1 is the highest rating you can achieve.  There are five categories, each rated 1-5, and then your total score is averaged.)

He pulled that off in one year.

Oh, and he does this awesome Kermit the Frog impression that's really accurate and always good for a laugh.

So yeah.  Mr. Robertson is a phenomenal conductor.

But to me, he was so much more than an orchestra teacher.  He managed to intertwine long-lasting life lessons with teaching music.  Sure, you could argue that music is a long-lasting part of your life, and I'd agree with you, but Mr. Robertson's teachings were far more than that.  It's been almost five years since I had him as a teacher, and yet some of the things he said still resonate in my life today.  Oh, and due to schedule conflicts, I haven't even played my viola in over a year - and yet, my high school string teacher's lessons still affect my every day life.

So what was it about these lessons that stuck with me?  Was it just "hard work pays off, practice makes perfect, music is life"?  Well, yes.  But it was so, so much more than that.

Practice Makes Permanent

We've all heard it before.  "Practice makes perfect!"  Encouraging all people to practice whatever it is that they want to do, so that one day they'll be great at it.  Mr. Robertson used to tell us this.  But over time, as he consistently heard the same people making mistakes or playing out of tune, he realized that the saying is wrong.

He drew us a little diagram with a target where your finger should go on the string for a note.  Obviously, you want to hit the "bullseye" every time so that you play in tune.  Then he drew the same target again, only with dots all over the place; this is the diagram of a person who doesn't practice and is sometimes sharp, sometimes flat, and rarely in tune.  But then he drew another diagram, and that one represented someone who consistently hits the note wrong, but always in the same place on the string.  It was then that he said this to us: "Practice makes permanent."

If you practice something very often, but are always practicing it wrong, you are never going to magically get it right one day.  You must practice something correctly in order for practice to make you perfect.

But if you practice something incorrectly, all you're doing is making your mistakes permanent.

Nickle and Diming

This one is a little more commonly known about, but it was the first time I actually heard the phrase.  One day, we just kept talking.  I don't even remember what we kept talking about - probably business things, like practice charts, upcoming performances, songs we'd like to play; I imagine we birdwalked a little and ended up talking about pop culture or something as well.  Maybe we talked about our school and the way it worked.  I don't even know.  In any case, we would play a little, talk a little, play a little, and talk some more.  Our school had block scheduling, so each class period was 90 minutes long.  This was both good and bad; it was a nice, long period, but it also kind of made you feel like you had all the time in the world.  So you birdwalk and talk about non-class things, you stop playing for 3 minutes at a time in a music class, and you think there's still plenty of time to rehearse the next song, and all of a sudden the bell is ringing and everybody has to rush around to pack up their instruments and make it to the next class on time.

So, as we're taking another chat break, Mr. Robertson brings up the phrase nickel and diming.  When you spend 5 cents or 10 cents at a time, you don't think anything of it, but suddenly after a few weeks you realize you're out $50.  If you waste time a few minutes at a time, you think you'll be fine, but after a whole day you realize you've probably lost about 1-2 hours of work time.

Don't nickel and dime your time away or you'll end up missing out on something important.

Once Means You Were Lucky; Twice Means You Can Do It Again

This is probably one of my favorite teaching techniques of Mr. Robertson's.  Occasionally, if there was a particualrly difficult section in a piece, he would go section-by-section or even person-by-person to make sure everyone could do it.  First violins, play measures 8-12 for me.  Try it again.  There you go, you got it!  Try it once more.  Awesome.  Second violins, you're having a really hard time with measures 15-18.  Let's have each person play them.  Great Amanda, you got it!  Try it again.  Yes!  Good job!

Whenever you're struggling with something, you practice it.  If you get it once, that's great, but you might have just been lucky.  Maybe your fingers stumbled in the right direction this time, or maybe you fell but landed perfectly by chance.

Whatever you're doing, when you get it right, do it again to make sure you actually know what you're doing.  And if you can do it a third time, that means you've really got it down.

On a related note...

When You Perfect Something That You Were Struggling With, You Not Only Grow As A Musician, You Grow As A Person

This was another thing Mr. Robertson would tell us to encourage us to practice.  If there's a few measures, a whole section, or an entire piece that you just can't play, you play it over and over again until you can get it right.  And when you've finally conquered those notes, you know you've gotten better at it, which means you've grown as a musician.  This piece used to be hard for you, but now it's easy.  But you also grow as a person.

Something used to be hard, and now you made it easy.  You can feel more confident in yourself knowing that you're good enough to learn, grow, and fix your mistakes.

 

Cheating On Something Is Only Cheating Yourself

Because it was high school, we had to have grades from written things.  Rather than assign us bullshit papers or worksheets, we simply had to turn in weekly practice charts, signed by a parent, to show that we've been practicing.  Easy enough if you actually practice when your parents are home to hear you.  But what about people who don't practice?  They either don't turn in practice charts, which lowers their grade (and come on, who doesn't get an A in orchestra?), or they forge their parent's signature and lie about practicing.

Obviously, Mr. Robertson didn't care enough to prove it by calling parents and asking them if their kid was actually practicing.  But, to discourage lying and encourage practicing, he warned us that the only person we're cheating is ourself.  Yeah, we get a grade that we don't deserve, but in lying about practicing, we've cheated ourselves out of getting better as musicians.

So if you're on a diet, but you really want that doughnut, go ahead and eat it and don't report it to your calorie tracker app.  But who loses in that scenario?  The app, which knows nothing but the numbers you give it; or the person who eats an extra 350 calories?

Cheating on tests is risky, because if you get caught you could get expelled or suspended.  But if you do cheat, and you don't get caught, who loses out?  The teacher who got one pulled over them, the kid you cheated off of who actually knew the material, or you, who only learned that the answer to number 6 was D?

Never cheat or take the easy way out.  The only person who is truly cheated is you, and there's no point. 

So, Mr. Robertson, I don't know if you'll ever read this or hear about it, but thank you.  You taught me how to be a better viola player, and in doing so you taught me how to be a better person.  My life is better having been touched by yours, and I hope that your future students will realize just how lucky they are to have you as a teacher.