When Allergies Attack

Allergies are the bane of my existence.  I have year-round allergies, but each spring I am once more reminded just how much Mother Nature hates me.

I love flowers and finally seeing the sun make an appearance after months of overcast and rain. I enjoy going outside without needing to wear 18 layers of clothes and a scarf.  Spring is when people go out and walk their dogs and when I go out to look at all the dogs being walked (I don’t have a dog of my own).  However, I know that every new flower that blossoms is Mother Nature’s latest attempt at killing me.

On the up side, I am not alone.  My roommate experienced a ten-minute sneezing fit yesterday at work.  I have seen more people rubbing at their eyes over the past few days (and I don’t think that all of it can be attributed to sleep deprivation). Apparently updates from allergy sufferers in my city are also “trending” on Twitter.

You’d think with such advanced medical research and high-tech companies here, we would have done something about this by now.  I bet that, given how many nerds/geeks that live in the area, this city has a higher-than-average number of allergy sufferers per capita.  If economics has taught me anything, it’s that this should create demand for allergy treatments within the market.  Other than allergy shots and an insane amount of antihistamines, I haven’t heard of any magical medical mixes that will solve this problem.

During most of the year, my allergies are a minor annoyance.  My allergies are background noise to the rest of my various medical afflictions.  On one hand, I think that my allergies are beneficial during every time of the year other than spring.  I need to make sure to keep my room relatively dust-free and somewhat clean.  I can’t let food get moldy without having a particularly annoying respiratory reaction. 

I imagine that my allergies are like beefy white blood cells that attack anything and everything that comes into my system.  I picture my immune system looking like the cast from “300” only with grenades, laser vision, and ninja-like reflexes.  Whenever everyone else is out with a cold or the flu, I look around and think, “Huh. I didn’t even know that was going around.”  Thank you, Godzilla-like over reactive immune system. 

If I were to have a conversation with my immune system about this, I would ask, “So that cold that everyone got except for me last fall.  Did I never get infected or were you guys just super effective?” The leader of my immune military combatants would likely say, “What cold? Oh, that pesky thing? We dealt with any of those silly buggers that tried to come in.  It was nothing.  That dust mite, however, that was an epic battle, believe you me!”  I think that the commander has a really cheesy absentminded British accent.  And probably wears a monocle.  Yes, definitely a space cadet.  I bet they even drink the germ battle fighter equivalent of Earl Grey tea.

Maybe there will come a day that medicine and science can create a way for me to work with the armed forces commander of my immune system.  So if any of you reading this are in the medical field or need a really cool research project, you should get on this.  You’ll have a willing human test subject.

Wibbly wobbly time

For whatever reason, time works differently in grad school.  In high school, weekends were the best thing ever; you spent time with friends, hung out by the river, played video games, whatever. 

Things changed a little bit in college, mostly because there was no parental supervision to keep stupidity in check.  In college, you could go out any day of the week, you could skip class without any immediate adverse consequences, and you had the most freedom (with the least amount of responsibility) that you were ever going to have again.  Weekends and breaks took on a whole new level of importance because now you could go places and do things and, most importantly, you could do whatever you wanted to do and your parents never had to know.

When you start work and have to stick to a basic 8-5 schedule (or, in my case, you get to do 8-5 plus about 10 hours a week of extra events or travel), breaks no longer matter. Summer was just another season for me, spring break had little or no significance beyond all the parking spots around work opening up because there were no students around. However, my evenings were a newly discovered blessing.  I remember that the first week of work I was too tired to do much other than make dinner and then go to sleep.  After that first week, however, I found myself asking, “What do you do in the evening when there aren’t any assigned readings or other homework?”  It was like magic.

As a recent college graduate with a degree in social science, I almost inevitably found myself facing unemployment. This introduced an entirely new concept of time to me.  Evenings were no different than mornings.  Weekends and weekdays were identical in every respect.  Time meant nothing.  I am pretty sure that there were about two months of time that I didn’t actually know what day of the week it was or the date. 

It was like the strangest time limbo ever.  It wasn’t the same as a break from school.  Breaks from school have a distinct end date.  That means that you have to have some concept of day/date/time.  Unemployment was like wandering a desert or being stranded in the middle of the ocean: it didn’t matter what I did or in which direction I wandered because it was just going to be more of the same.

Throughout the next few years, I yo-yoed between employment and unemployment like the most ill-conceived financial diet in the history of poor dieting decisions.  To solve this, I decided that the best thing was, obviously, to go deeper into debt and start graduate school. Why break even when I can just keep myself in debt for another decade, right? How could this possibly go wrong?

Now that I’m in the last third of my first year, I am discovering that time functions differently in grad school in a way that I’ve never experienced before.  Unlike undergrad when I had a lot of flexibility in selecting classes, thus ensuring that I always had at least one class that was “fun,” my entire graduate program is already laid out for me. 

Taking a combination of economics, program evaluation, policy analysis, and statistics makes time move at a vastly slower pace inside the classroom, but makes all deadlines hit one week sooner than it says on the syllabus.  You think, “Okay, two weeks should be plenty of time to do this project.” Then, two days later, you realize that it’s due in 24 hours and you have barely started.  Where did the other 11 days go?  Nobody knows.  Those days just disappeared into the ether. 

If you look through your notes from class, you discover that in the last two weeks, you have been attending classes and have been doing readings, but somehow you don’t remember any time actually passing between the announcement of the project and the deadline for said project. 

I am really beginning to identify with Schrödinger’s poor cat.  I’m neither alive nor dead.  I’m a grad student: the ultimate level of time limbo.

Theoretically, I only have about a year left before days of the week, what month it is, or what date it is will once more function linearly.  Until then, well, I guess I’ll just exist.