Good morning!

Damn, I have such hideous hay fever right now. My father had asthma as a kid and at a certain age he spent a summer with an aunt and the entire time he was there he never had an asthma attack. From that he deduced that stress had caused all of his problems and since his annoying mother wasn't at his aunt's house, Grandma must have been the cause of his stress and therefore the asthma. His position has some merit, that's true. (Of course it's also true that a lot of kids outgrow asthma.)

But he has stretched his point of view to encompass all allergies. Supposedly stress is behind my itchy watery eyes, my sneezing, the tickle in the back of my throat and my runny nose. It has nothing to do with the fact that my symptoms coincide with the arrival of pollen in a part of the country that has so much pollen that all of the cars are coated with a yellowish green layer of dust made up of hideous looking little grains of pollen:

This is a car covered with pollen:

And this is the pollen itself:

Wouldn't you think that a nasty looking sucker like that would cause some irritation? The copious snot has nothing to do with stress....not that I don't have stress, I do. But it's there all the time. The snot season will eventually go away. But the stress will remain.

I've been existing on Benadryl for weeks and there's no sign of it stopping. I don't know how much longer I can deal with this. I suppose that I should put out some cash for Claritan or one of those "previously by prescription" allergy meds but I can't see paying 12 bucks for 6 pills. I get the store brand Benadryl which works, but I only remember to take it when I start to get that killer tickle in the middle of my head. It's behind my tongue and sits between my ears. It almost seems as though I could get at it if I had a really long Q-Tip and I didn't mind shoving it in my ear. I try to itch it with the back of my tongue but that's like rubbing my eyes, once I start, I can't stop.

Ah, I think the Benadryl is working. Now what?

Right after I said that my eyes itched so badly hat I had to rub them and now I find it tough to stop for more than 3 minutes. I keep imagining those spiny little spores in my eyes and then I think, "This isn't fricking stress!!!!!" And then I DO stress out and I can't rub my eyes hard enough or fast enough and then I JUST CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!!

OK, maybe I'm better now. Not really but I have decided to "act as if". If I act as if there aren't spiny little life forms in my eyeballs, maybe my mind will believe it. I doubt it, but it could happen.

You know, I've gone and talked myself into a stressed out mood. I hear Regis in the background and that's not helping matters. Then, the little Regis girl du jour starts to talk and I want to scream!

You know, this IS what God made Xanax for, but I don't want to take it too close to the Benadryl. Damn. What the hell should I do now?

I know...in college they taught us transcendental meditaion...let me chant my mantra. "OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHMMMMMMMMMM." "OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHMMMMMMMMMM."

This is bullshit. We were told we could get 8 hours of sleep in one TM session. That was crap. And, it was a STUPID thing to tell a bunch of college students who would take that information and translate it to mean, "I can party all night and then hum for twenty minutes....and I'll be golden!"

It just occurred to me that I have to mow the lawn today. Man, I need to take a handful of Benadryl for that. I wonder if there's gas in the tank? Damn it, I can't sit here at my computer, I have to go sneeze my way to a freshly mowed lawn.

See ya!