I used to think I didn't have allergies, but sometime in the last ten years I noticed that I was inexplicably kind of sneezy, without seeming to have a real cold, on the same days people with allergies were complaining about being miserable. I still don't 'have allergies' in the sense that I do anything about it or that I'm bothered by it, but I think I am very mildly affected by pollen.
6. pollen allergies are actually a sign that the fleshsuit worn by the lizard person in question is degrading and should be replaced.
I have had horrible pollen allergies my whole life. Not living next to a corn field helps.
I developed a pollen allergy very briefly, to one specific pollen in Northern California. It was really intense. Then it went away. The end.
Does anyone know anything about allergies? It all seems super fucking mysterious. Why are there peanut allergies? I blame libertarians and grains.
Dr. Sears says it's probably because you didn't communicate with your crying child.
North Carolina was bad for me also, but only for a week or two in the spring
The Masai balance a peanut on their baby's head for the first three years continuously and they never develop peanut allergies.
Possibilities:...
You forgot to blame ObamaCare.
The general hypothesis, though it suffers by being too simple and tidy, is that most animals are continually afflicted by parasites and have an anti-parasite immune system. Whereas we human North Americans are parasite-free and thus our anti-parasite immune system only goes off in inappropriate situations.
One of the top immunologists, Medzhitov (not to be confused with Metschnikoff, the top immunologist of 120 years ago), has an interesting competing theory that sort of came out of nowhere, which is that allergy can be thought of as more of an anti-poison/venom mechanism than a part of the immune system.
There was a thing that Becks linked a while ago about cities planting boy trees that produce more pollen because they don't drop as many leaves (or something like that.) And it wouldn't be surprising to me to learn that warming trends correlate with more pollen, which might affect more people.
My allergies have mostly disappeared since moving out West. I'm still allergic to pollen, but there aren't mold spores out here as much, and it turns out that I can handle ordinary amounts of pollen as long as nothing else is triggering my allergies.
If wet grass stuck to my skin, I'd get a welt.
I have no allergies because I ate dirt as a child.
Maybe you'd better keep eating it, just in case.
If wet grass stuck to my skin, I'd get a welt.
On the welt, Moby used to wet grass.
My allergies were way worse when I was a kid than they are now, because the Ohio valley is some kind of allergy disaster zone.
I'm in the Ohio valley (kind of) and this is the least allergic I've been.
It all seems super fucking mysterious.
It is. They only have best guesses (hygiene hypothesis; low-level auto-immune something). Older kid has an anaphylactic reaction to all nuts. Younger kid hasn't been exposed yet, but I suspect he could safely subsist on a diet of arsenic.
15: Thank you. I hate making puns on my own words but somebody had to.
My dad is nearly invulnerable to poison ivy, but I've needed seven days of prednisone after touching a few leaves with my arm while it was covered in a sleeve.
The "Asthma & Allergy Foundation of America" has produced a list [PDF format] of the worst cities for allergies, consistent with my comment 16.
It seems to be the Eastern time zone, plus Texas and minus the Northeast.
Huh. I feel like every city tells you how allergies there are just the worst ever when you move there. Like a weird local pride thing. In Austin I had a weird maybe-allergy. Like LB, I noticed it because everyone else was complaining about their allergies. I'd just be terribly exhausted (think: still tired after ten hours of sleep at night), but no typical stuff I'd think of as allergy symptoms. I saw a doc, got the full allergy panel, and I am allergic to . . . nothing.
It's amazing how different Richmond is from DC, and Providence from Worcester.
Like a weird local pride thing
Austin definitely does this relishing-mass-suffering-camraderie thing.
When I first got to Austin people would tell me that eventually I'd get the allergy they call "cedar fever". I had never had allergy problems, and scoffed--if I didn't get it my first year there, why would I develop it later? Sure enough, in I think my third Austin winter I basically blew my nose nonstop for a month or so. God that was miserable.
I assume that people used to suffer from allergies but called it something else.
They had a fit and died. Nobody said "damn, that food must have been cooked in peanut oil."
My brother had horrendous hayfever as a child, until he was a teenager. I never did, until I was pregnant with kid A. It's not awful, but enough that I want to take an antihistamine each day for a month.
25: But DC did it, too! Both allergies and temperature of winter/summer. ("So, coming from TX, are you ready for winter?" "Yes.")
26: Not the Live Oak? That's what I heard about most.
I had run of the mill congested sometimes stuff until I had been in Austin three years. Then January rolls around or whenever cedar goes on its killing spree, and I started waking up with my eyes crusted shut etc.
For me, being snuffly is basically part of life. I've never examined it enough to work out if it's related to allergens. I did grow up in Austin, but it's also been the case everywhere else.
30: This is me every April, due to maple. We're on the leading edge of it right now. I've had it since high school, although back then I thought it was just a cold; it took me embarrassingly long to figure out that it was annual. Still haven't really done much about it, besides OTC medication, but I really should. Having my eyes completely inflamed for a month is not fun.
29.last: I'm sure people complained about live oak too, but cedar fever really seemed to be in different category from what I think of as "really bad pollen allergy".
I had bad allergies starting at age 11, but only in Spring and Fall, now (much, much older) I hardly have anything. An allergist tested me and said it was "grass pollen."
I think people are more aware of allergies now, just as they are more aware of autism.
@31: "snuffly" is the word we always used in my family, too. Is that common? I thought it was a parental nonsense word for decades. How about "snorfly"?
Snorfly, no, but sniffly is an alternative.
I picked up pretty bad allergies in NYC, in my early/mid 30s. Took me two springs to figure it out - the first one I just thought I had a really extended flu. The second, it started to happen again and I didn't correlate until I walked outside after being inside all of the previous day, nearly immediately feeling like I was being choking while chopping onions, and then felt like an idiot. Just never occurred to me that I would develop allergies.
Up to now in SF, I've been fine, but this spring, something's been bothering me again. So at least in my case, I think it is cumulative somehow.
Or maybe I'm just getting old and everything is just going to suck more every year.
In any case, I eat a lot of Claritin.
21: The Central Valley is not on there. That's where I first experienced pollen allergies. It all gets swept in from the Bay Area.
I didn't really mind the pollen allergies until they rendered me unable to eat raw peaches (and apples, cherries, pears, carrots...) Stupid pollen.
It's some stupid reaction related to pollen allergy. In my case, birch. Oral allergy syndrome.
39:
Did you have to eat trees to figure that out?
I know someone who started reacting rather poorly to any citrus sometime in her 40s.
If it's like when I was a kid, they cut her back and put extract of ground up trees there.
I feel like every city tells you how allergies there are just the worst ever when you move there.
The hell, I've never heard of this. Oh hey, my and Cala's cities are in the bottom 10 of that list. Suck it, easterners.
This could be argued either way. On one hand, there should be an allergy-adjusted averaging, as people who can't stand it get away, if they can. On the other, people just like to bitch. or perhaps birch.
By the way, I propose AAA as a new measurement for use in models to explain housing prices. It is perfect, because nobody will pay attention if they even read it, and if they don't, they'll think it is something about accidents or car repair, and be hilariously wrong.
Birch pollen! When I lived in Sweden my whole face would stream on May evenings, though it wore off a bit after a couple of years. This is distressing, because the smell of birchtrees in spring is one of the most wonderful and evocative there is.
Rape, on the other hand (whatever Americans call it) has no merits. It just smells of allergy and thick clear streams of snot.
Rape, on the other hand (whatever Americans call it)
Big Ben, the Nittany Lion Club, fracking. And that's just in PA.
Do Americans even have a common word for rape-the-plant? We call the oil "Canola" because that's how the Canadians branded it and we're happy to let them have it.
Rape, on the other hand (whatever Americans call it) has no merits. It just smells of allergy and thick clear streams of snot.
I bought a bottle of rapeseed oil the last time I needed to stock up on vegetable oil because I'd never tried it before and why not. I'll tell you why not. It's rubbish and smelly.
So is hayfever not a term in the US?
So is hayfever not a term in the US?
No, it is. It sounds a little old-fashioned to my ear, but that might just be because these days everyone just calls it "allergies."
Hayfever's a term, but one I'm not sure I've ever heard from someone born after the 1940's.
I say hay fever, perhaps because all the hay when I was a kid.
My dad used it to describe (what I presume were) his own pollen allergies, but he was born in the 1940s.
Probably for the same reason as Moby, although the absolute quantities of hay were surely much lower.
OT; Kid puke, ahoy.
I dreaded that middle of the night sickness stuff but I was in my early 20's at the time. I've read older adults need less sleep so maybe you're in a better position to deal with it.
56: I've mostly heard it from my mom, who in addition to being old also spent a lot of summers on her grandfather's farm and was surely around a lot of hay.
I'm thinking that if most of the allergies are from tree pollen, "hay fever" doesn't seem like a good term. But when there's mostly grass and crops, it might.
It's possible that people who were around hay a lot might have associated their allergies with it even if it wasn't actually the main cause.
I've always thought I wasn't prone to that kind of thing but OTOH I've never lived back east where apparently there's oceans of trees just spraying everyone with their airborne jizz.
Some western cities are pretty bad too (though not nearly as bad as eastern cities according to the list in 21). Albuquerque is awful for pollen in the spring because of all the cottonwoods. I never had seasonal allergies until I was in middle school, when there was a particularly bad year for pollen and I started getting them. I've had them ever since.
And of course Anchorage is just packed with birches, although it doesn't seem to make the list at all (probably because it's too small).
Everyone sprays you with airborne jizz in the Bay Area, but it is people. At least, partially, it is phone-borne. (Phizze?)
Oh, and I'm out out of it at the moment, but I use rapseed oil. I don't like the term. I need to get some.
I can't offhand think of anything else I use that is named offensively. Curry is the closest, but I don't buy that, it still seems to be food most often, even though there is some creep-in, and I'm making fucking spice replicating something, so fuck you.
I can remember being a kid in the south being given a n@@@@r pie. Some people called Moon Pies that.
68 from me too. Curry's a perfectly cromulent word. It's a mild anglicisation (really just a transliteration) of kari which is a Tamil word that means, more or less, "curry".
North Carolina was bad for me also, but only for a week or two in the spring
In NC, it's mostly pine pollen. If it hits during a dry spell (as it often does), the sheer volume of it all is pretty impressive. However, I've never been affected by pollen--indeed, no allergies at all that I know of--and for those few weeks I feel like Superman compared to the drippy, wheezy mass of my cow-orkers.
Quick, Superman! Use your heat vision to destroy the snot-blob before it devours the building!
69, 70: Madhur Jaffrey (sp) has a rant about curry powder as a pre-concocted spice mixture that's inauthentic in an imperialist way, but I don't think she abjures the word "curry".
IIRC, when I was a kid, hayfever was more or less the only thing that ever felled my strongly-constituted father, and my sister was allergic to a ton of stuff. My mom had limited allergies, but I really didn't have any - except for melaleuca in Miami, which developed when I was in 7th grade or so (after 5 years in state). It was super-intense, and came out of nowhere, but my mom had heard that it was one of these trees that people who aren't allergic to anything are allergic to. And, sure enough, since I left Miami, I've never had bad allergies, esp. not pollen-related ones.
Being in a dusty old house, I've developed mild dust allergies, in the sense that, when I put on a sweater for the first time in a winter, I almost inevitably have a huge sneezing fit that lasts all morning, and then passes.
It's weird, because AB washes the sweaters each spring and stores them in a zippered bag, so there shouldn't be dust, but I don't know what else would cause it only that first wearing.
my and Cala's cities are in the bottom 10 of that list
because inversion smog has killed all the outdoor plant life?
74: clearly you are allergic to zippers.
i assume it's because everybody moves to different parts of the country these days. most people probably become desensitized to the local flora they grew up with. but if you move to a place where all the plants are different than those you're used to, you're going to be allergic, eventually.
as concrete proof: my wife and i moved to NC from upstate NY. within a few years, we both noticed we were having seasonal allergies for the first time in our lives.
76: Probably allergic to the detergent, but only if aged and concentrated.
If they're made of good wool (not "washed" and mixed with who knows what before processing), they will outgas for years. You may be reacting to sheepsmell. Or rabbit or llama, or whatever you put in to your sweaters. I have a few handmade sweaters that, while I don't really react to them, are itchy the first time they come out of storage if they don't sit for a while.
Madhur Jaffrey (sp) has a rant about curry powder as a pre-concocted spice mixture that's inauthentic in an imperialist way
Madhur Jaffrey has a recipe for curry powder in her damn cookbook.
Britain is apparently being suffocated by pollution as we speak. Only not this bit of it, so I hadn't realised.
Rape, on the other hand (whatever Americans call it) has no merits. It just smells of allergy and thick clear streams of snot.
But the fields full of yellow blooms are so beautiful!
Re: the curry thing, maybe it isn't common, but it is used as a slur. I (euro-mutt white boy) heard it used a couple of times, and a friend who is of Pakistani descent said it was fairly common. But this is anecdata, and it was after 9/11 in NYC. It seemed targeted at those who sort of looked like wannathose. He moved away long before I left, And I don't think I heard it after maybe 2005, so maybe the use faded.
Oh. I could see 'curry' being used as a slur in that sense (haven't run into it myself, but I'd probably understand what was going on if I did), but it wouldn't make the word offensive when used in relation to food, I don't think.
Being in a dusty old house, I've developed mild dust allergies, in the sense that, when I put on a sweater for the first time in a winter, I almost inevitably have a huge sneezing fit that lasts all morning, and then passes.
This happens to the heater in my office. Except instead of sneezing, it sets off the fire alarm all morning.
re: 81
It's visible here. Sky is very opaque looking.
83,84: I've run into it used as a slur, though a pretty mild one all things considered. I wouldn't let that influence me using it in reference to food, though.
I've heard curry used as a slur, usually by unreconstructed racists of the worst kind, but I don't see what that has to do with Anglo-Indian stews. I've heard French people dismissed as frogs, too, but I'm not going to stop using the word as a colloquial synonym for members of the order Anura.
Oh, I see what I did wrong there - I implied a category error in my list of horribles. I don't think anyone disparages a food by calling it curry, except maybe those who hate British variations.
Speaking of category errors, I will say that anyone who puts mayo in something they call salsa should be first against the wall.
89.2 Is it OK if they call it salsa mahonesa?
85: that happens here on the very rare occasions we turn on the furnace here at home. Except things you expect to pull out of the drain come out of the vent over the stove.
I feel bad about throwing them away rather than helping them register to vote, so we don't turn the heat on much. Well, also, it is absurdly expensive to heat this place, and usually not needed.
79 is interesting. I was going to say in the original comment that it wasn't limited to wool sweaters, but if they're all packed together....
85.last: That's 8 months' worth of dust burning off the coils. If you really cared, you could first plug it in outside.
I know. It's too big to take outside, though. Usually I just open all the windows and fan like crazy.
This is an interesting commenting pattern: rise, somehow read unfogged with the morning papers, which sort of count as work. Sort of work all day with distractions mostly turned off. Come the evening, whoops, it's either read here or get out a proper book.
Of course, I can take it or leave it alone. But these fellers, these fellers (tears of pure alcohol course down ruby cheeks) these fellers has me destroyed
I have probably misremembered that well enough to googleproof it
OK. It's this
"Do you see that? That thing there? Cigarettes. Them lads. Do you know what I'm going to tell you...?"
(Is suddenly overcome by paroxysm of coughing; roots benightedly for handkerchief as tears of pure alcohol course down the ruby cheeks, Recovers.)
"Them fellas there. Them fellas has me destroyed..."
It turns out that our mother the google knows what we mean even when we can't quite say it
90:
Pendejo porqiera alamentos is probably a better descriptor, but I get all my Spanish from taquerias, so that is probably off.
The Saharan smog was really visible here. I walked home without thinking about it and my chest felt weirdly tight when I got home.
I like rapeseed oil, but we tend to buy it from small-batch local producers. It has a very nutty taste in my opinion, and while the odour is strong I don't find it unpleasant.
I developed allergies while living in Northern California, but they were never too bad. Then I moved to England and had allergies every day for a year. Now it's getting quite a bit better - just a few days some months where I notice it.
When I buy curry leaves in the store on Pilk the folks there (older generation from India) just call the ... curry leaves. Also have no idea what grumble is on about re wool ...
Although do adore the off-gassing of curry leaves! Always walk out of the shop after buying them with the bag shoved up against my nose, inhaling deeply. Mmmmmmmmm.
91: has urple changed alias again? Confused about cookery, weird things coming out of his airvents...
urple wouldn't eat curry, would he? You can't buy it packaged in a plastic sleeve.
TastyBite are curry in a plastic sleeve.
104: we don't know that what he is eating is actually curry. All we know is that he thinks it's curry. It could be anything.
And you can totally buy packaged curry in a plastic sleeve. Ready meals, right? I had one last night due to laziness and inauthenticity.
Not entirely OT. It wasn't very nice curry.