- I like writing in numbered lists. But when my blog posts get sent to Goodreads, they strip off the HTML numbering, and that makes it look like a jumble of loose paragraphs.
- I take albuterol for allergies, and the smell of it is a very direct reminder of my childhood when I took it. They did change the formula at some point, I think to remove CFCs, but the plastic dispenser is the same shade of bright yellow, with an orange cap.
- Tennessee Williams died while putting in eyedrops. He would put the cap in his mouth when he tilted back his head, and choked on it. (I’m sure he was drunk, too.) I think about that story every morning when I put in eyedrops.
- I take too many allergy medicines, and I’m still miserable. I sometimes think I need to detox from all of them, or move to somewhere like Norway or Iceland where I wouldn’t get allergies.
- I once read an article or maybe it was an online quiz, where it determined the best places to live to not get allergies. I’d already lived in most of the places, and had bad allergies there.
- Although I am an atheist and do not believe in any sort of higher power, I do believe that I have bad luck, like when I move to an allergy-free city and get allergies anyway. But the belief in “bad luck” would define some kind of mechanism or power that would be causing it, which is confusing to me.
- I’m writing on the chaise section of my couch, and one of my cats (Loca) is sitting next to me and staring at me.
- I think I pay far more attention to my cats’ health than my own. Every day, I feel panicked that someday, their health will fade and they will die, and I will have to deal with it.
- It’s the same sort of distant fear that I had about retirement when I wasn’t working. I knew someday it would happen, and I felt powerless about it, but couldn’t do anything in the immediate future to remedy it.
- I like to think my retirement is under control, but I wish it was tomorrow and not in twenty-some years.
- My tax person called me today and said she was retiring. She’s going to South America. She did give me another tax person, so we’re not in a lurch. But when talking to her, I found it odd, because she’s probably the only person who knows how much I’ve saved for retirement.
- Maybe I should look into the allergy situation in South America. I imagine it’s bad.
- Everyone I knew who moved to the US from Asia developed very bad allergies. I used to think this was because of the different types of pollen, but there’s a theory that it has to do with the different bacterias in your gut. It’s why, they theorize, people in less hygienic countries never get allergies, and why they are becoming more of a problem now in sterile, developed countries.
- You never hear about the Viet Cong stopping a terror campaign because of hay fever.
- I read about this theory because one of the new treatment experiments involves implanting hookworms in your guts. You get sick for a few weeks, but then they balance out the immune system somehow. You can’t get it done in the US anymore, because of the FDA. There are clinics in Mexico, and it costs thousands of dollars. It’s a big new fad in other auto-immune disease communities, like MS.
- I’ve seriously considered the hookworm thing, except for the cost, the sickness, and having to explain the whole thing to everyone who asked me.
- I got food poisoning when I was in Mexico, but didn’t throw up or have diarrhea. I ate a salad at a plantation tour, and knew as I was eating it that it would cause me to be sick. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
- This was the same trip where my crown fell out and I had to get it repaired at a dentist that did not speak English, and I don’t speak Spanish.
- I always hated that when I was on a cane or when I had my broken arm, everyone asked me what happened and expected a full explanation. I couldn’t even buy a hot dog at a cart without someone insisting on a full recapitulation of my entire medical history.
- All of the good hot dog carts in New York were the ones that cooked them on rollers. Most of them kept them floating in a tub of hot water, though, and I always found those gross. I imagined catching Legionnaires’ Disease from that water.
- Legionnaires’ Disease is a bacterial pneumonia discovered after an outbreak at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia in 1976, where 182 people got sick and 29 died.
- The bacteria was subsequently named Legionella. It circulated in the air conditioning system of the convention hotel. It worries me that there’s something similar at our building, probably a pollution, that is causing my allergies, and I’ll be stuck trying to sell this house and unable to, like those fracking victims that have to bathe in bottled water and can light their tap water on fire.
- The best roller hot dogs were the ones at Papaya King. They seemed thinner than normal hot dogs, with a thick, crispy skin that had a lot of snap to them.
- At Juno, they would get a birthday cake for you for your birthday. This one girl who worked there did not like cake, so they got her a bunch of Papaya King hot dogs stacked in a pile like a cake.
- Now I am really craving hot dogs.