shanmonster | Save Me From the Mongolian Hordes

I shouldn't have gone to work yesterday. I felt like shit, and by the time my shift was over, I felt even shittier than shit--like maybe shit someone had eaten and then shit back out again. Yeah, that bad.

I seem to have caught the flu that's been bouncing around the city. My chest feels like weak bellows filled with fire. When I cough, it's like my lungs are punching my sternum hard. My head hurts like the bejeezus, and my muscles feel like I've been worked over by a meat tenderizer. I can only barely talk, and my voice isn't exactly mellifluous. So I called in sick for tonight.

Right now I ache so much I don't know what to do with myself. I'll probably have a cup of tea with honey and then go right back to bed.

Last night was taxing on my poor, sick head. I kept getting phone calls from Asians with a poor grasp on English. The topper was when a group of Mongolian bankers called me to look up information on one of their colleagues. No one seemed to know how to spell his name, and I was on the call for about thirty minutes before we could finally locate him. It didn't help that the Mongolians didn't know how to spell their own names. I'm guessing it's because they don't normally use a Latin alphabet. Normally, I'm very good at sight-reading, but the Mongolian names escaped me. I couldn't even begin to pronounce them. It was like a strange mixture of Russian and Chinese, but with consonants and vowels in places which made no sense at all to me. And when the native Mongolians pronounced the name, it bore little resemblance to what I saw in front of me. Apparently the sound made by the letter G (as in "mingle") can be pronounced several times in a word without actually being present as a letter. Augh!

Yul Brynner was Mongolian, but his name is easy to pronounce. It must be a stage name.