When someone asks you what happiness is, tell them this. Happiness is coming out of a long cold. Your sinuses have been clogged for a week. You've been coughing up the same pieces of gooey yellow phlegm every five minutes. They struggle to get out, but they don't quite make it. Sometimes the coughs pile on top of each other in their struggle to get out; you haven't finished the fifth before the sixth one comes calling. When you go driving, every time you descend a hundred feet or more, it starts to feel like you're carrying the entire Earth's atmosphere around in your head. It bears down on you, oppresses you. You yawn to try to relieve the pressure, but it does nothing. Days pass. Your phlegm becomes thicker, your coughs raspier. They burn like someone made you breathe ground glass. You make little, half-coughs in an effort to satisfy the demon within that wants you to pneumatically eject alveoli and bronchi from your mouth. You croak pitiful requests for water to anyone who will listen. Finally things start to change. You cough up thick chunks of brown phlegm, and spit them out into the sink. They awe you so that you stare at them a few minutes before washing them away. Then, without warning, your Eustachian tubes open up again, and the mucus flooding your sinuses magically drains away. You can hear for real for the first time in an eternity. You almost forgot what it was like. You inhale deeply, and don't collapse in a fit of coughing on the floor. You look around, and realize you'd forgotten what it meant to be healthy. This, my friends, is happiness.