danajohnhill.org

As everyone in Florida knows, this has been a brutal season for allergies.  The oak trees have been dropping their flowers, and everything in town is covered in a yellow-green dust.  Perhaps because of this–or perhaps because of exposure to infected classmates–I am miserably congested and uncomfortable.  I have to keep my mouth open to breathe, but this creates a pathetic wheezing sound sure to disturb a sleeping spouse.  I did my best to disguise my tubercular timbre at work this afternoon, but my tens of listeners probably thought I had a clothespin on my nose.  My colleagues at the station offered me all manner of medications to combat my symptoms.  I am actually considering missing class tomorrow morning.  Not that it feels any better to stay home, but it’s embarrassing to have nasal faucet at school.

Don’t read the following if you’re easily disgusted:

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Things right now are going very badly for me.  Here is a short list, in no particular order:

• I have no working toilet in my house.
• I have several exams and papers due this week.
• My poor wife has been injured or sick for several weeks and I am powerless to make her feel any better.
• My email seems to work only around 50% of the time.
• Cox Cable switched from the national PBS high-definition feed to the local one, and now I don’t get the same programs; other programs I like show at different times; the signal looks much worse; and I will now have to endure the frequent pledge drives, which the national feed doesn’t carry.
• I still haven’t got my motorized bicycle running.
• I changed guitar strings a few weeks ago, and now my Telecaster won’t stay in tune with itself.
• My guitar makes an annoying buzzing sound because the outlet my amplifier is plugged into isn’t grounded.
• I cannot stop eating Girl Scout Cookies and I feel guilty.
• I have a million chores to do around the house and very little time to do them.
• I have to read hundreds of pages for school, and I am not up to the task.
• I am very tired, and it’s only nine o’clock in the morning.
• When I am at school, I cannot concentrate on what my professors are saying, because I am thinking about one or more of the above.

I have long been grateful for the good health I enjoy.  Those who know me well know how seldom I am sick.  Other than my omnipresent nasal congestion–which I attribute to an allergy to dust and cat hair–I almost always feel 100% fine.  I did, that is, until I started school last year.  I used to credit my good health to a naturally strong immune system and good habits like frequent hand-washing.  But my defenses are no match for an enclosed, windowless classroom of sneezing, coughing, wheezing, disease-stricken students.  (Not that having windows makes much difference these days, since in most modern buildings, what windows there are are designed not to be opened, but the four different rooms in which I take classes this semester have no windows whatever.  One apparently did a long time ago, but they are closed up, and on the other side is a hallway and an elevator.)  Germs are all around me all day, and it was inevitable that I’d catch a bad cold sooner or later.

By Saturday evening I was feeling uncomfortable, and Sunday I couldn’t breath through my nose at all.  I took a “decongestant” last night.  I didn’t read the warning label, but it must read, “side-effects include nasal faucet”.  I’d rather be congested.  Last night I didn’t sleep at all well, and when I awoke this morning I knew work was a bad idea.  It isn’t that I couldn’t have performed my job.  It’s not demanding phsically.  I remain seated most of the time, and I don’t have much interaction with others.  But nobody wants to hear an apparently dying man on the radio, so, I took the extraordinary step of calling in sick.  I don’t think I’ve missed a day of work from illness since the 1990s.

So, I am at home today.  And even if I were physically able to go out and put the finishing touches on my motorized bicycle, I cannot: it’s been raining all day.  This happens every week.  Next it’ll turn freezing cold.

School tomorrow will be torture.

I went to the optometrist today for my first eye examination in eight years.  The last time I went was in the summer of 2000, when my roommate Lee and I walked down to the Reitz Union, which used to have a business that sold eyeglasses and a great doctor.  It was the first time anyone ever explained to me how my astigmatism made my eyesight much worse than simple near-sightedness.  The doctor used a racquetball cut in half.  It was helpful.  But he told me at the time that contacts to correct astigmatism were expensive, so I went with glasses, and the cheapest $8 frames I could find at Walgreens.

These days, however, they have contacts for any vision malady, so I had an exam for contacts today.  They dilated my pupils, and I could barely keep my eyes open all afternoon.  But the doctor was nice–the good doctor from 2000 closed his practice, so I had to find a new one–and her office was really nice.  She did an odd test with moving dots of light to test my peripheral vision.  And after several varieties of drops were squirted in my eye I could barely see anything.  But I’ll go back sometime this coming week to get “fitted” for my contact lenses.  I am excited.