BODY WATCH : Sniff and Run : Headache, fever, aspirin, nasal spray. Your cold has made you a drippy, mouth-breathing swamp creature.

A cold is like a divorce, or the decline of the Roman Empire, or trying on dresses and discovering you’re a size 14 now, or waking up hung over with a tattoo and a girl, neither of which you recognize: No one can say when it starts.

Or where: It goes back a week to that escalator handrail you touched, or it goes back millions of years to a Darwinian pas de deux--cold viruses and primates co-evolved, stalking through the mutation tango until the world was given the miracle of mankind, a species with both upright stance and runny nose.

At the start of your own cold, it’s almost pleasant, a kind of self-awareness, as if not just your ears but your whole body were ringing lightly. You can’t tell whether you’re hot or cold, and you may experience a slight prickly feeling inside your ears, nose and throat, as if you’d just eaten a Shetland sweater.

You sneeze sharply, four or five times. You rummage through your desk drawers for a Kleenex, a cafeteria napkin.

“Coming down with something?”

“Sometimes I just sneeze like that,” you say, blowing your nose. “There’s a bug going around.”

“I was hoping I’d get through the winter without one,” you say.

The air is stale, as if there’s not enough oxygen. Your skin is dry. You’re thirsty, that’s the problem. You walk to the water fountain, feeling a little odd, an encapsulated feeling, as if your clothes have grown thicker.

“I think I’m coming down with something,” you say to the sneeze analyst.

“Don’t get near me,” says the analyst, waving hands at you as if he’s trying to scare a cow out of his yard. “I get everybody’s colds.”

Adults get from two to six colds a year, depending on what statistics you’re looking at, costing millions of work hours and billions of dollars in medicine. People get colds all over the world, the Arctic, the tropics.

A day or two down the road with your particular cold, past the headache, the fever that peaks at a disappointingly trivial 99.2, the aspirin, nasal spray and gargling, the itchy ears and bedtime coughing, and the lozenges from last year you can’t pick the foil from now, you not only have a cold, you have become your cold. You can’t imagine life without it.

It’s as if you’ve been transmogrified into a mouth-breathing swamp creature that excretes from its face. Unfortunately, most of the holes in the human body are in the face, and when you have a cold, they ooze, drain, expel, run, clog, crust, all in service to the virus.

A cold is like going through hell week and at the end of it you find out there isn’t any fraternity. A cold has no point, unless you’re a virus. It is the price you pay and then get nothing at all, unlike the broken leg that was the price of your ski trip.

With a cold you have not looked death in the face and laughed. Instead, you have looked life in the face and sniffled. Other diseases transform you, as if by magic, into victim, survivor, pariah, statistic, symbol, case study, medical curiosity and corpse. The cold offers none of these options.

A cold lacks cachet. Nothing described with the word runny has cachet. Runny implies cooking failures, unpleasant cheese and your nose.

Compare a cold with other diseases. Gout has a Dickensian richness to it, and the pain can be exquisite--it’s the most fashionable disease. An eye patch has a piratical zest. Ulcers used to be the stigmata of the Protestant work ethic. With dengue fever, you acquire a tropical mystique, along with your shaking and suffering.

But a cold is ridiculous.