Last semester, while we were in Chicago, my friends and I would often go out to a greasy diner called Standee’s. The waitress who worked the night shift there was a friendly woman and would chat with us from time to time. But every time we mentioned we were students from New Orleans and planed to return there in January she would tell us, with a fearful look in her eye, about how terribly dangerous it would be and how she would never go down there in a million years. “Get your shots,” she said.She was a germ-a-phobe, she said, and had heard about the toxic soup and mold on TV. She shuddered at the thought of all the dreadful diseases that awaited us upon our return. I always marveled at her claims to germ-a-phobia because I don’t consider myself a germ-a-phobe but I did often find myself polishing mysterious substances off the silverware at Standee’s. But perhaps that is not the point.The point is, now I am back in New Orleans, and it is not quite the scene out of “The Seventh Seal” that the waitress warned me it would be, but it is notable that everyone on campus is coughing up like crazy, myself included.Is it the effect of Katrina’s toxic soup? Mold?It’s possible, but I think the real answer may be simpler than that.There is a cold that inevitably sweeps across campus a few weeks after the students move back into the dorms. It happens every semester. No matter how many glasses of O.J. you chug, multivitamins you take, or Echinacea you religiously consume, the cold will get you. Resistance is futile. I suspect that the coughing you hear around campus now is that cold, nothing more.But in all fairness, the cold this semester is pretty bad. It has been widespread and nasty, with every side effect you could hope for out of a cold: fever, runny nose, clogged nose, headache and, of course, coughing.And I think that the reason it’s so bad this year may be related to Katrina, but not because of the toxic soup.If I had to guess, I’d say the reason this year’s cold is so bad is we had students returning to Loyola from more than 400 schools around the country in January. Suddenly we had a student body with germs from all over the country, and in our excitement to be back everyone was hugging, kissing, drinking, smoking and carrying on.And they weren’t washing their hands.It must have been like a virus’ dream come true.I did get sick after coming back to New Orleans, but I don’t think I’m going to die from it. Actually, I’m feeling better already.I guess I can be a little germ-a-phobic sometimes, and I was a little nervous about coming back to New Orleans. I made sure that, as my waitress suggested, I got my shots. You’ve got to take some chances somewhere, though. And if I weren’t taking my chances here, I’d only be taking different chances with that mysterious film on the rims of the coffee mugs at Standee’s.