Ah, pollen. We meet again.
I’m allergic to pollen, which has not been quite as much of a problem here in Chicago as it was in DC (where a couple of months ago the count got up to 2587. 100 is considered enough to trigger allergies) , but over the last week it got hot and hasn’t rained.
Unfortunately, every allergy medication I have tried has one particular side effect that makes another medical condition I have much, much worse, and really, I’d rather just bitch about sneezing so much than be in an enormous amount of pain. You should prefer this as well, because I’d bitch a hell of a lot more were I in that much pain.
So, anyway, the little Green Particles Of Death have arrived in Chicagoland, and the sneeze-a-thon has started. And I don’t sneeze quietly or gently. Ask Eddy, Elisa, and Cleo about their entertaining ride home from the CRC play, where I essentially couldn’t stop sneezing the entire drive back. I’m sure they thought I was going to crash the damn car.
I’ve inherited my father’s sneeze, though his is still a good 20 decibels louder than mine, and has a much better low end to it. But we both have the same process when we’re about to sneeze.
We start going “ah….ah…” desperately trying to defuse the sneeze, but then our eyes start to water. And for a second, we think that the sneeze may have been averted. But before we can mentally get to the end of that sentence…
aaCHOOOOOOOOOOO!
It comes out swinging at 150 miles an hour, threatening to blow over (or at least scare the shit out of) small mammals. It echoes, particularly at both my dad’s old house and his new apartment in Atlanta. He used to send Smokey, his cat, running like the wind up to where I was sitting “doing homework” (i.e. watching TV).
Neither of us wins the prize for loudest sneeze, though. That goes to my friend Miyuki, who I could hear sneezing in the hall on the second floor when I was in class on the third floor in high school. God help you if you were sitting next to her if she had a cold. You’d be deaf for days.
The problem I have is that once I start sneezing, I can’t stop. I’ll be fine for a couple of hours, then I won’t be able to stop sneezing for like 10 minutes. I really hope I don’t throw something out of alignment (like my brain, for instance) with a really powerful sneeze…
I guess we’ll see whether this happened when I get my grades back.